Z77 mITX Round-Up: Five of the Best – MSI, Zotac, ASRock, EVGA and ASUS
by Ian Cutress on December 31, 2012 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- MSI
- ASRock
- EVGA
- ZOTAC
- Asus
- Ivy Bridge
- Z77
- mITX
Zotac Z77-ITX WiFi Conclusion
At the time of writing this conclusion, each 7-series mITX motherboard I have tested has used the same layout in their design – the CPU socket goes near the bottom and the chipset is at the top. I am beginning to wonder who thought this was a good idea – having everything this way round means that the socket presses up against the DRAM and PCIe slots, restricting cooler size and compatibility. It means that the CPU Power connector is in an awkward place onboard and power cables will have to stretch over the board to reach it – this is less of an issue on the Zotac board due to the included 8-pin extension cable in the box. The argument for this layout is usually a robust ‘well it puts the IO on the edge of the motherboard’. But the IO usually has the long thin cables designed to go anywhere – I have no issue stretching my SATA cables over my RAM to fit, or a front panel audio cable. However, big bulky power cables across the board and restrictive cooling due to socket area placement are not enticing prospects.
Enough of socket placement aside, the Zotac Z77-ITX WiFi has a number of good points to be mentioned. The video outputs on board are a novel interpretation of the ‘three digital output’ allowances. Normally we get a DVI-D, HDMI and a DP on almost all other mainstream channel Z77 motherboards – however Zotac have shaken up the market. We get two HDMI outputs (for dual screens, or sending video one way and audio the other), and a mini-DisplayPort. The mDP port is bolstered by the mDP to DP cable found in the motherboard box, meaning every modern digital display (except Apple’s Thunderbolt display) is covered. Kudos to Zotac on this design choice.
Also in hardware, we get dual Realtek 8111E GbE NICs alongside integrated WiFi, making sure all networking options are open. Unfortunately we do not get any network management software in the box to complement this design choice, despite the fact that Realtek has some proprietary software which should be almost free to include. We also get the perennial favorite of reviewers, system builders and troubleshooters alike – the power/reset switches (kind of rare for a mITX board) as well as a two-digit debug. Despite the extra cost these afford, I believe they are well worth the money on every motherboard in the market. Other hardware features onboard are an mSATA, two fan headers and an extended heatsink covering the power delivery.
There are also some poor hardware choices in this build, such as the Realtek ALC889 audio which failed our RMAA 192 kHz test. Almost all motherboard options I see are Realtek ALC892 or above, which should offer a better audio experience. It should also be mentioned we do not get any Realtek audio software included in the package either.
On the software side, the driver CD requires a manual installation of all the drivers rather than the painless silent install we are becoming used to. There are no software utilities to speak of for overclocking or fan controls – the only way to control the fans is via the BIOS. For the BIOS itself, we really only have a colored skin on top of the normal BIOS options, rather than anything embracing the graphical BIOS concept of interactivity. As a downside as well, SATA configuration on the BIOS tested defaulted to IDE rather than the preferred AHCI.
In the modern motherboard industry it is very hard for a smaller manufacturer like Zotac to get a design win. In certain aspects Zotac have achieved it, plugging in some functionality into this mITX board that no other manufacturer has. But it gets let down by other design decisions and the lack of interoperability between the user and the system itself. Putting a Zotac motherboard in a build all comes down to price, and given that I have seen it on Newegg for $130 one week then $163 the next means that you may have to pick and choose the best moment if you want this board.
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mike_b - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
Interesting article, but I have to ask why would someone spend more for a Z77 chipset when using 'just' an i3? Surely a much cheaper H61 chipset could do the job admirably, and at much lower cost.Z77 makes sense if you're overclocking, which is excluded from this test...
IanCutress - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
H61 has no chipset USB 3.0, no chipset SATA 6 Gbps, and you are limited to PCIe 2.0. H61 is also technically limited to one single sided DIMM per channel, and no SATA RAID. There's also SRT to consider, that would be advantageous with the ASRock and the mSATA on the rear.Ian
mike_b - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
It might make an interesting comparison to see what net advantage is gained with the added features of the Z77 chipset compared with the H61. If budgets are limited the ~100 dollar cost difference between the Z77 and H61 mainboards makes a big difference; that money saved could be put into something which makes more of a performance difference (SSD rather than HDD for example).Anandtech is one of the best tech sites around, you guys do a great job. I do sometimes see though an emphasis on more expensive products when in terms of real-world performance you could get almost the same thing at a much cheaper price. Might be worth mentioning somewhere.
Not least because with yet another new socket coming with Haswell all these 1155 boards will be seen as out of date soon anyway.
IanCutress - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
Once we get into the swing with Haswell, we will hopefully covering the whole spectrum. Though it is worth noting that motherboard manufacturers, want to put their best foot forward, and would prefer their halo/channel boards get covered before their OEM / low end offerings. Hence this is why you rarely see many mainstream reviews that are not from forums dedicated to the market segment and users testing their own equipment. We are hoping to rectify the balance in due course. If there are any specific products you might want us to test or examine, drop me an email and I'll see what I can put in my schedule (as full as it is[!]) :)Ian
StormyParis - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
This is a major issue, not limited to motherboards: whenever I'm looking for something middle of the road or outright cheap, I can't find reviews.These Z77 MBs are a nice example: even though I'm recommending/building PCs regularly, most of them mini-ITX, I never came across a use case for Z77. Nobody apart from teens that still have something to prove overclocks anymore. People who want to do multi-GPU get a big case, and a big board. Are we supposed the extrapolate that the makers of good Z77 boards also make good H77 and H61 boards ?
I understand you've got to make do with what you're given by the OEMs. And that reviews was very good, as usual. Pity it is irrelevant ?
Tech-Curious - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
That's an interesting observation. I have to say, I never noticed a significant lack of coverage for low-to-mid-range components (either in general or on Anandtech in particular), until this Fall, when I was in the market for a lower end motherboard.I guess I just always gravitated to higher end mobos before. Or maybe the coverage for such products was more comprehensive years ago. My memory's foggy, so it's hard to say.
In any case, motherboards appear to be the exception. If anything, I think the internet has generally grown more bullish on low-to-mid-range CPUs and GPUs in recent years (probably, in part, as a result of the stagnating console situation, which results in stagnating system requirements for games).
But all of that rambling aside, yeah. It'd be nice to see more diverse motherboard analysis. When I bought a b75 a couple of months ago, I literally couldn't find a review for that chipset. It wasn't a big deal; it's not like b75's features are any great mystery, after all -- but it is a little nettlesome to trip over sixty bajillion z77 reviews when there's nary peep about any other chipset.
In other news, Ian's review is a good one -- and given that I've been a faithful user of Asus motherboards for the last 15 years, it's nice to see them take home the prize. :)
Etern205 - Saturday, January 5, 2013 - link
My guess would be, why review a cheap board when majority of the readers here won't even bother buying it?And as for Asus boards, I've heard, they do something called based-line features. This means all boards from the bottom of the range to the top (Intel B75-Z77) will have the same base-line features, other features are just added like BT, WiFi, extra lan, etc.
Tech-Curious - Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - link
Yes, I think the issue is that (at least with respect to Intel chipsets) low-end motherboards don't support overclocking. So they're both less interesting to review (fewer measurable differences in performance among different models), and they're less appealing to the presumed audience of sites like Anandtech.Still, the B75 is a perfectly good chipset. If you aren't heavily invested in overclocking, z77's advantages are likely wasted on you. Personally, I'm well beyond my overclocking days; I just don't have the time or the patience to go through the almost endless tuning process anymore. (Even if you find a stable OC at the outset, it can become unstable later, and/or a given application might expose instability that stress testing didn't, weeks or even months down the road).
jonjonjonj - Friday, January 4, 2013 - link
just cause you don't overclock doesn't mean other people don't. why wouldn't you? because you want to get the fastest cpu that you can afford means you have something to prove? some people are just idiots.Zap - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
But there isn't a $100 difference between H61 and Z77. There is a cheaper Gigabyte Z77 ITX board that's only around $60 more than the cheapest H61 ITX board, and it was even on sale recently for another $13 off making it less than $50 difference.Alternately one can go the H77 ITX route and get all the Z77 goodies except for overclocking, for around $30 less than the cheapest Z77 ITX. I think $30 more than H61 is reasonable for those extra features, plus guaranteed out-of-the-box BIOS support for Ivy Bridge.
I do agree with your (mike_b) first post regarding the choice of CPU used. Ian Cutress, didn't you have a spare K CPU laying around? There are so many people building overclocked ITX rigs these days. I did in a Silverstone SG05 with low profile air cooler to hit 4.2GHz. Plenty of others use the Bitfenix Prodigy and liquid cooling to hit clocks normally reserved for ATX rigs. Another review site (Tweaktown) tested overclocking on Z77 ITX boards and the ASRock hit near 4.8GHz. THAT'S what I want to see.
Of course this AnandTech roundup has some very useful information too, such as DPC latency tests and POST times. Keep up the good work there! But please, know your audience. Next time if the board is supposed to be overclockable, test that feature.
Maybe there can be a companion article about overclocking and heatsink clearance? Would be a shame to not overclock this nice collection of Z77 ITX boards.