ASUS F1A75-M Pro AMD APU Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

I’m gonna have to take a step back and look at the ASUS F1A75-M Pro from a little bit of a different angle than usual. Much of my background with computers is from an enthusiast point of view. I like to to go fast, score high on the benchmarks, and have an excessive number of frames per second. That’s not exactly what the AMD Lynx platform is design for. The “Lynx” platform is aimed at the mainstream market and the casual gamer. Though it did do pretty darn well, but well touch on performance shortly.

Before we get to far into this, I would like to spend a few moments discussing the differences between the systems that we compared today. Most of the components used were identical between our two systems.

• XFX Radeon HD 6950
• Corsair Vengeance 8Gb kit
• Corsair TX 750 Watt PSU

The above components won’t effect the price comparison of the build. What is different is the CPU or APU, and the Motherboard. The key component that is going to effect the price in our particular case is the processor. The Intel Core i5 2500K is currently retailing for $219.99. The AMD A8-3850 is going to have an suggested retail price of only $135.00. Throw in the fact that the ASUS F1A75-M Pro is retailing for $119.99 plus shipping and you have a motherboard and CPU that doesn’t cost much more than the Intel Core i5 2500k alone.

When we compared performance between the Intel Core i5 2500k system and the ASUS F1A75-M Pro APU system, there were a few areas that the ASUS F1A75-M Pro fell short on. To be fair though, as we pointed out above the Core i5 2500k system is a more expensive system to build. Where we saw the differences was when using the XFX Radeon HD 6950. When we tested with the discrete card we saw a little bit lower game performance, but nothing horribly significant. When it comes down to it the performance differences that we saw wouldn’t effect day to day use.

Where the ASUS F1A75-M Pro truly excelled today was the performance of the integrated graphics. Every one of our graphics tests that we compared the Intel HD Graphics 3000 to the AMD A8-3850 with AMD Radeon HD 6550D there was a clear and decisive winner. For our recap of the graphics performance let’s start with Total War: Shogun 2 in DirectX 9 mode. The ASUS F1A75-M Pro was able to pull out an average that was 143.4% (1280×1024)faster than the Intel system! Increasing the resolution to 1920×1080 we saw an even larger difference of 151%! We also tested Batman Arkham Asylum and saw differences of 76% at 1280×1024 and 68% at 1920×1080. That’s a pretty significant difference considering the ASUS F1A75-M Pro costs significantly less! We’re not done yet with the advantages of the F1A75-M Pro!

DirectX 11 is the latest and greatest version of DirectX and adds some eye-candy to today’s games. Our combination of AMD A8-3850 and ASUS F1A75-M Pro is quite capable of DirectX 11 performance. If we were to compare our systems from today with DirextX 11 it would once again be the ASUS F1A75-M Pro coming out on top simply because the Intel HD Graphics 3000 inside the Intel Core i5 2500 doesn’t support DirectX 11. While that makes it easy to declare the AMD APU system a winner, just supporting it isn’t enough. If it doesn’t perform it would be a waste of technology. Fortunately it does perform! In Futuremark 3DMark 11 the AMD Radeon HD 6550D was able to hit a solid score of E1783 3Dmarks! It isn’t the worlds fastest 3DMark 11 score, though it gets the job done in style.

The ASUS F1A75-M Pro retails for only $119.99 plus shipping and the AMD A8-3850 is expected to retail for only $135.00. As with most motherboards from ASUS the F1A75-M Pro is backed by a three year warranty for that piece of mind in the event of a motherboard failure.

Legit Bottom Line: If you are a casual gamer looking to put a DirectX 11 capable system together on a budget or plan on running a discrete graphics card, the ASUS F1A75-M Pro has everything that we have come to love from ASUS! Performance, Price, and features make the ASUS F1A75-M Pro a motherboard that should be at the top of your short list!