Review: MSI A75MA-G55

As part of the review kit for the AMD A8-3850 Fusion APU we were supplied with this MSI A75MA-G55. The Fusion chips ought to be at home in these sorts of small scale motherboards.
And recently it's all been about the small form factor motherboard.
The microATX form factor has been making one hell of a comeback since so much of your PC's tech has disappeared beneath the unassuming heatspreader of the central chunk of silicon in your machine.
Since graphics started to come back on-die it has freed up a hell of a lot of real-estate on the motherboard.
You can go one of two ways then, either cram in a load of, possibly, useless extras or trim down the footprint of the board to shave off the unnecessary space.
We've seen some tiny H67 and Z68 boards recently, even going as far as the mini-ITX form factor, and this MSI A75MA-G55 is the first AMD Llano Fusion board we've seen on a smaller scale.
The desktop version of Llano, the Lynx platform, lends itself perfectly to this smaller form factor.
With impressive integrated graphics performance and low-power requirements the A-series APUs make the perfect HTPC that might occasionally want to turn its hand to a li'l light gaming.

The Asus and MSI boards are incredibly close in performance terms when it comes to stock speeds, below though it's obvious the level of extra performance the Asus' overclocking capabilities offers.
Still, the MSI copes happily with the Dual Graphics option, offering decent performance in the hybrid CrossFire mode and with improved RAM speeds.

As a whole we've been impressed by what the desktop version of AMD's Llano can produce, both in terms of graphics and more surprisingly in its raw computational chops.
We paired up AMD's top APU, the A8-3850, with this board from MSI to see what we could get out of this smaller mobo compared with the full-fat Asus F1A75-V Pro.
At stock speeds it's all good.
The MSI board happily keeps pace with the larger Asus offering, with performance only a shade off. The A75MA-G55 is also rather well-heeled in the features department too, showing off full SATA 6Gb/s coverage and USB 3.0 sockets out back and through a break-out box too.
With a little light coaxing we also managed to squeeze out 1,600MHz from our DDR3 RAM, making a surprising difference in games performance – especially with a discrete card installed in Dual Graphics mode too.
But this is a brand new chipset and brand new software too, so it's only to be expected that there be teething troubles with the BIOS.
It took a little extra effort to get the extra memory speed, but sadly the same though couldn't be said for any overclocking shenanigans.
The amount of overclocking headroom in the Llano desktop APU is one of the things that impressed us most. The notebook version had a very weak CPU part, but the Lynx platform has a lot of potential in it.
We managed to hit 3.7GHz with our 2.9GHz APU sample on the Asus motherboard.
According to MSI's old school, non-EFI BIOS we were able to hit over 5GHz on air. Unfortunately our astonishment at this feat evaporated when it transpired the motherboard was doing nothing of the sort.
In fact we couldn't force any extra performance out of the A8-3850 APU at all. Not a single silicon sausage.
Now as an HTPC it's not a massive problem, and I'm sure subsequent BIOS updates may well affect a change in this lack of performance, but for now it's tough to recommend knowing what you could get out of that APU.
We liked
As an HTPC motherboard, with no pretentions towards enthusiast performance, it's a great price and fit for the mATX scale and AMD Llano Fusion APUs.
It's also impressive that you can get almost the same stock performance out of this motherboard as the more expensive Asus board.
We disliked
As much as it's not so important for the HTPC arena this board's aimed at, the fact there is zero overclocking capability is a bit of a downer. Though that does seem like a BIOS issue rather than a hardware failure.
Final word
As a form factor the mATX size is a perfect match for the Llano platform, this vaguely broken MSI board however is currently anything but a perfect match.