Final Thoughts

Before we go any further, it's fair to say that all three A75 motherboards offer adequate performance, overclocking abilities, features and value. However, the point of this article is to determine what product we feel is the best option.

In terms of features, we think Asrock's A75 Extreme6 is the best offering with its superior SATA support, expansion slot design, inclusion of Firewire and an easily accessible CMOS reset switch along with onboard power/reset buttons. Although Asus added DisplayPort along with an extra audio jack, this isn't enough to dethrone the A75 Extreme6. Likewise, the Gigabyte A75-UD4H has a better audio solution, but it's only a marginal improvement over Asrock and Asus boards. In fact, we bet you wouldn't even notice the difference between the two Realtek chips.

As for performance, if you looked at any of the benchmark pages then you undoubtedly noticed the Asus F1A75-V maintained a dominant position throughout virtually every test. Asrock's XFast USB utility was impressive as it significantly boosted USB 3.0 performance, but the A75 Extreme6 ranked last in most tests. Although Gigabyte's A75-UD4H delivered superb overclocking results, the F1A75-V was the better overall performer – both in speed and power consumption.

We didn't dedicate a section for our installation impressions of each board, but it should be noted that the testing phase wasn't without hiccups. First, we were unable to configure the F1A75-V's UEFI with the Logitech Wireless Wave keyboard and mouse. The mouse could only track horizontally, while the keyboard was so laggy it was unusable. Switching to the Logitech MX5500 solved the issue, but this was an annoying compatibility problem nonetheless.

Meanwhile, Asrock's A75 Extreme6 was quite sensitive to memory timings. As we discovered when overclocking, many frequencies and timings accepted by Asus and Gigabyte boards would not work with Asrock's. The board was easy to configure when overclocking, but you'll definitely want to be cautious when tinkering with your memory.

Gigabyte's A75-UD4H worked well for the most part, however, we kept running into hard drive detection issues with AHCI enabled. For some reason drives would often go missing with AHCI on and we couldn't determine why. There were no such problems in IDE mode and the board worked flawlessly. Updating the BIOS to the latest F3 release didn't help.

On paper, the A75 Extreme6 does well in the value department as it's the same price as the F1A75-V while offering more features and a better layout. However, the F1A75-V proved to be somewhat faster in our tests. On the other hand, the Gigabyte A75-UD4H appears to offer better build quality.

With that, we can conclude that you can't really go wrong with either board overall, but depending on your needs you should focus on Asrock's board if you demand certain features such as its superior PCIe configuration. Value-minded folks should consider Gigabyte's board for its higher build quality, better overclocking capabilities and slightly lower price. Ultimately, Asus offers the best overall solution, providing a feature-packed board with the best overall performance, solid overclocking and power consumption.