The Board - Layout

Like all ZOTAC mITX products, the A75-ITX WiFi is very small, pretty much smaller than the socket area of some other products. Everything is crammed tight together, and believe me when I say there's a lot here. The rear of the board is just as busy as the front, although this product in particular is pretty open in comparison to some other ZOTAC products, thanks to the A75 chipset's integrated abilities and low power consumption.


The socket area of the A75-ITX WiFi is closely enclosed on all sides, with many surface-mounted parts, and the board's slots and chipset cooler are all close by. Of course, there's not much that can be done about that in such a small form factor, and if anyone, ZOTAC has tons of experience in making the best possible out of so little. The back of the socket is fairly clear for aftermarket backplates, mostly due to AMD's retention design having such a large bracket of its own. At the same time, outside that bracket area, we do find a fair bit of components close by, including the parts of the VRM shown in the picture above. For larger products, so much nearby would be an issue, but for this form-factor, it's not much of an issue at all as most aftermarket coolers won't even fit in the first place.


For expansion, the A75-ITX WiFi features a single full x16 PCIe slot, which connects to the CPU itself, allowing full performance from any current discrete VGA card. The included WiFi card which lends itself to the A75-ITX WiFi's naming, sits just above the PCIe slot, with the included WiFi/Bluetooth card installed into it. For memory expansion, we find only two DIMM slots, which does limit the A75-ITX WiFi's total memory capacity to 8 GB.


With everything crammed so close together, we find the pin headers spread out all over the place, with the USB 3.0 header right near the I/O panel tower, with audio, USB 2.0, and COM headers really close by, while the front panel header is found on the opposite side, at one end of the DIMM slots.


Speaking of the rear ports, we find five total analog audio connections, enough for full 8.1-channel analog output, as well as a digital SPDIF optical port, stacked together in the same I/O tower. Next to the audio we find four USB 3.0 ports in two pairs, with each pair mated with a LAN connector up top. There is just a single DVI and a single HDMI port for video output, next to which is the WiFi antennas covered with red plastic nubs, which sits over a clear-CMOS button. There's a combination keyboard/mouse PS/2 port under which we find another two USB 3.0 ports, making for a total of six USB 3.0 ports on the rear panel, and not a single USB 2.0 port. Forward-thinking, indeed. This could also pose a drawback. BIOS-mediated USB hand-off for third-party USB 3.0 controllers has been buggy with pre-SP1 Windows 7. With the lack of chipset-based USB 2.0 ports, some users just might find their pre-SP1 Windows 7 setup program not being able to detect USB keyboard and mouse properly.


The ZOTAC A75-ITX-WiFi has four SATA 6 Gb/s ports located between the chipset cooler and the DIMM slots, pictured in the second image above. You can also see the CMOS battery in that same image, between the SATA ports and the DIMM slots, in a vertical clip in order to save space.
There are only two onboard fan headers, one for the CPU, and one for a case fan. This is not many compared to many other products, but for mITX, it is more than enough.


The chipset cooler fitted to the ZOTAC A75-ITX WiFi is a pretty basic finned aluminum heatsink, shown in the first image above. The chipset itself is pretty small, and houses a fair bit of I/O functionality only, so doesn't consume that much power to need a cooler as large as the ZOTAC A75-ITX WiFi uses, but due to the confined spaces of mITX installs, ZOTAC went a bit overboard here to ensure that it wouldn't overheat even in low-airflow environments.