The Board - Layout

The ECS A75F-A is clad in the normal color scheme from ECS for its "Black Series" of products. The black PCB features both white and gray accents that don't stand out too much, but really help give the air of quality. Not completely a full ATX board, the ECS A75F-A is just a bit narrower, measuring in at 220 mm instead of the standard 244 mm. This means the ECS A75F-A doesn't use the full nine ATX case mounts either, which is seen clearly by looking at the back of the board where we can see the six holes the board does use, outlined with double white circles. The back of the board is fairly busy because of its smaller size, but thanks to the simplicity of the AMD A75 platform, there's nothing that stands out that may be a cause of concern.


The socket area is fairly clear, with lots of space around for aftermarket cooling solutions. Looking at the rear, we can see a large white area surround the socket, even protruding from under the factory metal backplate. Not every AMD A75 product comes with a metal backplate, so we were quite impressed to find one here instead of the plastic clips that are on some more inexpensive models from nearly every manufacturer.


It's not very common that we find a full seven expansion slots on enthusiast-level products these days, but the ECS A75F-A definitely stands to break this tradition, with three PCI slots at the bottom, a pair of PCIe x1 slots, and two x16 slots. It's worth noting that the gray x16 PCIe slot is x16 electrical and is connected directly to the APU, but the black one only features a x4 link, via the AMD A75 chipset. There are four DDR3 DIMM slots on the ECS A75F-A, each supporting 8 GB DIMMs, bringing total memory support on the ECS A75F-A up to 32 GB.


There are a total of four internal USB headers on the ECS A75F-A; a single black USB 3.0 header, and three USB 2.0 headers, one of which (the gray) features support for the EZ Charger function. The rest of the bottom side of the board edge is filled with the front panel connector, a printer port header and serial port header, and two audio connectors, one of which is nothing other than the front panel speaker pins. The front panel audio header is located right next to the rear I/O tower, where it might be an issue for cable management, while we find another header on the other side of the board, right by the BIOS chip, labeled SPI_DEBUG.


ECS has outfitted the A75F-A with quite a few display outputs on the rear I/O; we find HDMI, DVI, and analog VGA. There's a single eSATA port, four USB 2.0 ports, and dual USB 3.0, with a PS/2 mouse/keyboard combo port and the audio tower rounding out the connectivity options. We also find an RJ-45 LAN port and a ClearCMOS button on the rear I/O, and the ClearCMOS button is a nice treat we really appreciated once we began overclocking. We found only five SATA 6.0 Gb/s internal ports, and we say "only" because the AMD A75 chipset supports six total, however, the eSATA port seen on the rear I/O is also controlled by the AMD A75 chipset, which does bring the total to six. For fan connectivity, we find just three fan headers, with the CPU_FAN header a 4-pin PWM type, and the other two, found just above the SATA ports, are simple 3-pin headers. It's worth noting, however, that we found each header can be controlled from within the BIOS independently, a feature that some boards lack, even though they are priced at three times the cost of the ECS A75F-A.


The AMD A75F-A features a rather small, finned cooler, under which we find the AMD A75 chipset itself, situated at 45 degrees from the rest of the board proper.