The Board - A Closer Look

As per our usual, the first thing we are looking at, of course, is the BIOS chip, found on the right board edge close to the SATA ports. Soldered directly to the PCB, it's not ready for removal by end users, which may prove to be cause for RMA should the BIOS be corrupted beyond recovery. Next up we find the Richtek VRM controller, not a very common controller, capable of powering four phases.


Looking at the phases, they each feature a very standard HI/LOW MOSFET triplet, with a single inductor, as seen in the first image above. The DIMM VRM is very similar, seen in the second picture, although it does feature a different inductor. For clock control we find the ICS 9LPRS471CKL, a controller that has definitely made its rounds through the industry through the years.


Realtek provides both audio and LAN support, with the ALC892 CODEC providing the audio, and the RTL8111E PCIe-based controller for LAN. Both are utterly common place, seen on products that vary from the best of the best, to even entry-level products, a sure sign that driver issues are not something likely to be encountered with the ECS A75F-A.


AsMedia supplies the ASM1445 TMDS for the DVI/HDMI ports, while we found this rather large IC with a BIOS label on it seen in the second picture above just below the rear I/O audio stack. Removing the sticker allows us to see that's it's none other than a Fintek Super I/O, a part we haven't seen too often, but ultimately that is not too surprising, considering the fan control it offers isn't all that common either. It also supports temperature and voltage monitoring too, of course.


The cooling solution for the ECS A75F-A is pretty small in size, but did ultimately prove to be sufficient. The small VRM cooler makes excellent contact with the MOSFETs, and the small chipset cooler uses the same bubblegum-like thermal interface material we've seen on nearly every product we've looked at thus far. Of course, because of their small size, both do get fairly warm to the touch, but not enough to raise any concern, even in the low-airflow environment provided by our test bench.