ECS A75F-A Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

The AMD A75 chipset is a single-chip solution and is also known as an FCH (Fusion Controller Hub). This chip supports six SATA-600 ports with RAID (0, 1, and 10). One of these ports was routed to the motherboard rear panel as an eSATA-600 port. The SATA-600 ports are located at one of the edges of the board and won’t be blocked by the installation of long video cards on any of the two PCI Express x16 slots.

Figure 4: SATA-600 ports

There is no support for a floppy disk drive controller or an ATA-133 port.

This motherboard has 10 USB 2.0 ports, four soldered on the rear panel and six available through three headers located on the motherboard. It also has four USB 3.0 ports, two available on the motherboard rear panel and two available through a front panel connector, all controlled by the chipset.

There are no FireWire (IEEE1394) ports.

This motherboard supports 7.1+2 audio format, i.e., eight channels plus two independent channels for audio streaming. On this motherboard, the audio is generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC892 codec. The main specifications for this chip include 97 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog outputs, 90 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog inputs, up to 192 kHz sampling rate for both inputs and outputs, and 24-bit resolution. These specifications are good for the mainstream user, but if you are looking into working professionally with audio editing, you should look for a motherboard that provides an SNR of at least 97 dB for the analog input.

The portrayed motherboard comes with independent 5.1 analog audio outputs, but if you want to install a set of 7.1 analog speakers, you will have to use either the “line in” or the “mic in” jacks. The ECS A75F-A has an on-board optical SPDIF output, and you can install a coaxial SPDIF connector using the available “SPDIFO” header.

This motherboard has one Gigabit Ethernet port controlled by a Realtek RTL8111E controller.

In Figure 5, you can see the motherboard rear panel, with a shared keyboard/mouse PS/2 connector, four USB 2.0 ports, HDMI connector, VGA connector, DVI-D connector, clear CMOS button, one eSATA-600 port, one Gigabit Ethernet port, two USB 3.0 ports (blue connectors), and shared analog 7.1 audio outputs.

Figure 5: Motherboard rear panel