Asrock B75 Pro3-M review

Intel’s B75 chipset is the budget-friendly alternative to the more feature-packed Z77. Both support the latest LGA1155 processors but B75 lacks Z77’s overclocking features. However, there’s little to choose between the chipsets in terms of ordinary performance, as shown by this motherboard’s overall score of 101 in our benchmark tests.

As the Asrock B75 Pro3-M microATX is a budget motherboard, it has just a couple of rear USB3 ports and four USB ports. There are also two USB headers and one USB3 header on the board itself, so you can add other ports, either on your case or via expansion cards.

Other rear ports include the usual DVI, HDMI and VGA connectors for on-chip graphics, Gigabit Ethernet, an optical S/PDIF output for digital surround sound and five 3.5mm analogue audio connectors that can be configured for up to 7.1 surround sound.

The motherboard has four memory slots, so you can install up to 32GB of DDR3 memory. That’s plenty for even for a really high end system. There are also two PCI slots and two PCI-E x16 slots, although the second of these actually runs at x4, although you can still use it for a second graphics card connected via CrossFireX or SLI. The coolers on most graphics cards will block one of PCI slots when fitted into the top PCI-E x16 slot.

There are two SATA controllers on the motherboard. The Intel chipset controller provides one SATA3 port and five SATA2 ports. A sticker on the motherboard advises using one of these six ports for your main system disk, so the SATA3 connector is the logical choice here, particularly if you’re booting from an SSD. A second controller gives you an extra two SATA3 ports.

The motherboard’s UEFI interface doesn’t have an automatic overclock feature. Although its interface is really clear and easy to use and you can select memory profiles for high-speed RAM, the B75 chipset doesn’t support overclocking of processors with unlocked multipliers, although it does provide very limited adjustment of multiplier and voltage settings, We were able to fix the multiplier of our 3.4GHz Intel Core i5-3570K to 38, for example, but that’s the most you can achieve.

For a lot of people the lack of overclocking isn’t much of a restriction. With a great price, plenty of expansion options and decent performance, the Asrock B75 Pro3-M wins a Budget Buy award.