My deciscion to remain ATX at the time of upgrading to the Z77 chipset was heavilly inflenced by the lack of information and reviews pertaining to the new Z77 ITX boards available; these being the Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe, the ASRock Z77 E-ITX and the Zotac Z77ITX-A-E respectively.
The past 8 weeks however has seen the ITX concept nagging away at me, that and the fact my own requirements for a motherboard are simply as follows -
With my recent hands on experience of the ASRock Z77 Extreme4 and the impression it left apon me I elected to go for the ASRock E-ITX.
Of the three ITX boards currently available the ASRock Z77 E-ITX is the cheapest offering if you shop about, in terms of layout I believe it also offers the best layout of the three and it's certainly aesthetically pleasing to the eye.
Build quality is absolutely superb, certainly no bargain basement el cheapo quality tag can now be applied to ASRock; this comes from an individual who previously would never even entertain the idea of a motherboard not manufactured by Asus or Gigabyte.
As for performance, the overclock I applied out of the box was the 4.5GHz, I used the very same voltages that I utilised on it's big Brother the ASRock Z77 Extreme4; now for a board that only has a 6 phases for the CPU main voltage, one for the CPU VSA voltage and one for the CPU VTT voltage (6+1+1 config) the performance beggars belief!!!
Could it go further...
I set about applying a 4.8Ghz overclock
Ok how far can it go...???
Try 5.1GHz!!!
Even more impressive is that during the testing not once did I have any sort of instabillity or BSD occurence.
The past 8 weeks however has seen the ITX concept nagging away at me, that and the fact my own requirements for a motherboard are simply as follows -
- It have 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors
- A PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot
- It should be Z77 ideally ITX
- And lastly it should be able to overclock like the Devils own
With my recent hands on experience of the ASRock Z77 Extreme4 and the impression it left apon me I elected to go for the ASRock E-ITX.
Of the three ITX boards currently available the ASRock Z77 E-ITX is the cheapest offering if you shop about, in terms of layout I believe it also offers the best layout of the three and it's certainly aesthetically pleasing to the eye.
Build quality is absolutely superb, certainly no bargain basement el cheapo quality tag can now be applied to ASRock; this comes from an individual who previously would never even entertain the idea of a motherboard not manufactured by Asus or Gigabyte.
As for performance, the overclock I applied out of the box was the 4.5GHz, I used the very same voltages that I utilised on it's big Brother the ASRock Z77 Extreme4; now for a board that only has a 6 phases for the CPU main voltage, one for the CPU VSA voltage and one for the CPU VTT voltage (6+1+1 config) the performance beggars belief!!!
Could it go further...
I set about applying a 4.8Ghz overclock
Ok how far can it go...???
Try 5.1GHz!!!
Even more impressive is that during the testing not once did I have any sort of instabillity or BSD occurence.
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