looks like a very nice motherboard, if a tad expensive. especially the fan control with custom fan curves...wish my p8-z77 pro had that. wonder why 1.05 volt is the lowest voltage available?
Man these boards are nice! Im pretty sure my next build will be a itx or atx, but for now my 2600k @ 4.8/GTX 780 can handle everything I throw at it. I was this close to buying a used Maximus for my 2600k but didnt trust them coming from Hong Kong :/ Thanks for the review. Peace
I am in the same boat with my CPU I have falling in love with going on 4 years old. A good ole Sandy Bridge i7 2600k @ 4.9ghz on a p67-ud4-b3 MB with 2 EVGA GTX 770 4GB Classifieds in SLI I do not see a CPU upgrade coming until PCI-E 2.0 @8X start limiting GPU performance at high res and settings. As of now you only see a real difference between 3.0 and 2.0 at low res with low settings.
CPUs for P55 still run nicely too (cheaper than X58 CPUs, less power, easier to oc). I recently tested an i5 760 @ 4.2GHz with single/dual 7970 3GB, it was easily able to match or beat a 5GHz 2700K with a single GTX 980. I can't post the URL here, but Google for, "SGI Ian pc benchmarks". I tested with Stalker COP, CoJ, FC2, all the Unigine tests, and the 3DMark suites.
Only down side of Lynnfield CPUs is that P55 mbds have become highly valued for some bizarre reason.
Best used value atm though is a Z68 board and a 2500K, as the mbds go for diddly.
True the i7-920 (even the 950) are cheap, but a decent X58 board still sells for $200. I know because I just sold my Asus P6X Deluxe for that much on eBay. It's ridiculous how much these boards command, but I kind of get it, they're ridiculously good. I feel my H87's stability pales in comparison...but I wanted to do an ITX rig so the negligible performance increase and PCIe 3.0 weren't really the selling factors over X58.
This review is a little late. The board has been for sale for a couple months now. There is one issue I've had with my board and it's with Turbo settings. The default core ratio settings are to sync all cores. This will bring your CPU outside of its rated spec and in the case of a i7 4790k it will cause your CPU to overheat and throttle at extreme loads. At first I thought I had a defective CPU, but after investigation the board is maxing out at 4.4ghz with 4 cores instead of 4.2ghz. With the correct settings my CPU does not throttle and stays within thermal limits. With an aftermarket cooler I can run at 4.4ghz on all cores, but just barely.
This Turbo / stock CPU cooler issue should be a good topic for Anandtech to investigate. It seems many (all?) motherboards have wrong defaults for this and stock coolers cannot do the job.
tl;dr This board (along with many other "enthusiast" boards) overclocks the CPU by default through "multicore enhancement." It has been around for a few years, and AnandTech even had an article about it.
No, I specifically said *default* settings. Not with XMP. Not with Multi-core-enhancement. ASUS, Gigabyte, and others are, by default, syncing ratios on all cores.
The stock Intel cooler was what I originally had with my Impact and 4790k. Running an ffmpeg, h264 encode would reach 100C (the thermal limit) and throttle within a few minutes. I then purchased a ZALMAN CNPS8900 Extreme. This allowed ffmpeg to run while staying just under the 100C limit. After further reading of the Intel forum, with Intel support representatives replying, the motherboards are syncing all ratios, and a proper 44/44/43/42 ratio setting dropped temps even further to below 80C.
Undervolting is next to impossible on stock clocks. I have my adaptive voltage set to -0.05v. Anything more and the system is not stable.
I think ASUS assumes that if you're spending $200+ on one of their ROG-branded motherboards and $200-$300+ on a K-series unlocked processor then you're also probably spending $50+ on a CPU cooler that is good enough to cope with the additional heat of a few hundred MHz overclock and the potential corresponding voltage bump that comes with it.
It might be an unfair assumption to expect all users to buy a separate CPU cooler but they're targeting a certain audience with their ROG hardware and know that most of those users won't just rely on the stock heatsink/fan to keep their CPU adequately cooled.
I don't understand why manufacturers don't include 5.1 analog audio on high end ITX boards. If I can't have a sound card I'd at least like to have nice integrated audio.
My guess is that if you care that much about high quality audio, you would want to pass through to an external receiver/DAC/amplifier. From my experience onboard DAC always results in audible feedback. Digital out to an AVR resolves it.
He said nice, not high end. I have great sounding audio. Granted it's not on-board. Rather it's a Soundblaster X-Fi card paired with some Swans. If you are that anal about audio then you are going to do as you prescribed. However, we all don't want receiver/DAC/amps on our desktops. Don't blame you if you do though just don't poo-pah the OP for making the suggestion.
This is without a doubt the very best mini itx board on the market period. If I was going to build a mini itx system this is the board I would get. And for being the very best available the price isn't all that bad.
You could find a used mobo for cheap on ebay by the time an audio card dued and just buy it for the audio card. Probably even be able to find boards that aren't working correctly with a salvageable audio card.
Tough call between this one and MSI's Z97i gaming ac. I'd say the two sit atop the heap as far as quality goes. I am actually not bothered by the price of either.. as your trying to go small but that doesn't necessarily mean a budget build. Curious what Gigabyte has in their pipeline.. but all in all I like what I see from Asus here.. especially where the power connectors are. Nice review Ian.
It's really not a tough call Asus are the ones who started using separate boards for the power delivery and they have the experience and know how to do it best. Before Asus did that manufacturers were just using rly skimpy cut back heavily power delivery so it would fit on the board. Rather than go that route asus pioneered using a separate board so they had the room to make a beefy power delivery design and not have to sacrifice any OC potential compared to a larger board. Also as this review shows the bios and the software that controls asus motherboards is more advanced and more technically capable than MSI's.
The pcie-3.0 x4 slot for m2 ssd's is also huge. That's an incredible 4GB/sec of bandwidth. This also allows you to keep the build incredibly tiny as you can attach no storage drives other than the m2 card such as this one:
"The Samsung SM951 is expected to be NVMe compatible, and will be capable of up to 1,600/1,000 MB/s sequential reads/writes and 130K/100K IOPS 4K random reads/writes – slightly faster than the XP941 rated for 1,400 MB/s sequential reads. The drive is also NVMe low power (L1.2) certified and is rated to draw <10mW power at idle (probably DevSleep mode). Available in capacities up to 1TB"
So even with no 2.5" or 3.5" drives you can still have 1TB of storage space on a drive with 1600/1000 speeds 3x-4x faster than anything used now. This board is just the perfect starting point for an ultimate incredibly fast small form factor pc. With no 2.5" or 3.5" drives, no optical or any other outside media drive you only need enough space for a PSU (a small 600 watt 80+ gold silverstone sfx sized psu) your graphics card (a small mini itx sized gtx 970) and then since no optical or any other drives u can fit a nice 240/280mm rad on the top and you can overclock like you are inside a regular large tower.
You can build a really neat really powerful tiny mini PC and by using this board you end up with more power and features than even many ATX sized boards. This board allows you to go small without making a single real sacrifice and in most cases adds more features then many big boards. You can't go wrong with this board. Hell its even a nice board to choose even if you can fit an atx sized board. At 240 this board has the same features as atx sized boars that are 275+
Also since this is a mini itx board and haswell cpu's only have 20 pci-e lanes coming directly off it you can freely use the 4x m2 ssd slot and since there is only 1 pci-e expansion slot you don't have to worry about making any sacrifices since you are using the m2 slot you still get full 16x gpu bandwidth (even tho 8x is basically identical performance still nice to eek out that 1% better on 16x.)
The fan headers is a bit of a stupid situation, on the plus side you get 3 headers in 2 locations. on the downside these aren't pwm. I have a fan plugged in to cha_fan3 and it runs at full whack and can't reduce the speed. I need to try channel 1 to see if it's a problem generally or just with the coolhub. Worth noting that the z97i plus actually has pwm headers with fan xpert 3
Interesting to compare to the Z97I-Plus, which is also a very good board. I built an HTPC with this model, just a G3258 to begin with, 750 Ti, works very nicely indeed. It's also almost $100 cheaper, money that could be spent on a better GPU, CPU, SSD, etc.
Most people would be better served by the plus but these types of boards are often in bundles so it was at no extra cost to me. The overclocking features are a bit overwhelming. I've just activated the 2133 xmp profile on my memory and left it as it is for now. From what I can tell is that by default if I do this it activates the "free" 4x4400Mhz boost. I may attempt to do some sort of undervolting at some point.
Was able to try out the headphone output and was pleasantly surprised. Bizarrely plugging in to the rear it detects something, gives the option of headphones then sets to speakers but on the front panel it works. Not really an issue but weird, it detected my sennheiser hd598 as needing the middle amplification, >64 Ohm, setting but I switched it down to "performance" as it was loud enough for my tastes. Subjectively it sounds better than my late fiio e17, excellent soundstage and separation. I can certainly hold off buying a replacement headphone amp for quite some time so I've made my money back there already. Had a play with the sound add ons and they are potentially useful, but for general use best to turn it all off. The audio visualiser is a curious thing... arguably it's a form a cheating if you can see where the sounds are coming from! I suspect I will have fun trying to get it to play nice with games. 3d sounds is so awkward since direct 3d sound was deprecated
Just hoping that I will have more luck controlling the 3 pin fan with cha_fan1 vs the coolhub, otherwise I will need to resort to resistor cables or a new fan. Will report later on...
I bought the same bundle from OCUK, and seems I can control both CHA1 and CHA2(Coolhub) fans fine. I just use custom fan profiles in BIOS, and both fans (and the cpu fan) follow CPU temperature fine.
So, are you supposed to replace the screws on the CPU Power Daughter card heat sinks with longer screws to mount it to a case? Or do you only need to use the two free mounting holes?
i find it odd that nobody has talked about the fact that M.2 shares bandwidth with PCIe 3.0/2.0 X16 slot. Bandwidth on the PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 slot becomes x8 when M.2 device is inserted.
i'd like to know the impact of this with the graphics card if decide to use M.2 SSD. Thanks, appreciate the feedback.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
41 Comments
Back to Article
TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
looks like a very nice motherboard, if a tad expensive. especially the fan control with custom fan curves...wish my p8-z77 pro had that. wonder why 1.05 volt is the lowest voltage available?ME5H - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
Man these boards are nice! Im pretty sure my next build will be a itx or atx, but for now my 2600k @ 4.8/GTX 780 can handle everything I throw at it. I was this close to buying a used Maximus for my 2600k but didnt trust them coming from Hong Kong :/ Thanks for the review. Peacevarg14 - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
I am in the same boat with my CPU I have falling in love with going on 4 years old. A good ole Sandy Bridge i7 2600k @ 4.9ghz on a p67-ud4-b3 MB with 2 EVGA GTX 770 4GB Classifieds in SLI I do not see a CPU upgrade coming until PCI-E 2.0 @8X start limiting GPU performance at high res and settings. As of now you only see a real difference between 3.0 and 2.0 at low res with low settings.Morawka - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
the real hero are the millions of i7 920's still in circulation. You can get one on ebay for like $75. Quad core with HT ftwmapesdhs - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
CPUs for P55 still run nicely too (cheaper than X58 CPUs, less power, easier to oc). I recently
tested an i5 760 @ 4.2GHz with single/dual 7970 3GB, it was easily able to match or beat a
5GHz 2700K with a single GTX 980. I can't post the URL here, but Google for, "SGI Ian pc
benchmarks". I tested with Stalker COP, CoJ, FC2, all the Unigine tests, and the 3DMark suites.
Only down side of Lynnfield CPUs is that P55 mbds have become highly valued for some
bizarre reason.
Best used value atm though is a Z68 board and a 2500K, as the mbds go for diddly.
Ian.
Samus - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
True the i7-920 (even the 950) are cheap, but a decent X58 board still sells for $200. I know because I just sold my Asus P6X Deluxe for that much on eBay. It's ridiculous how much these boards command, but I kind of get it, they're ridiculously good. I feel my H87's stability pales in comparison...but I wanted to do an ITX rig so the negligible performance increase and PCIe 3.0 weren't really the selling factors over X58.mooninite - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
This review is a little late. The board has been for sale for a couple months now. There is one issue I've had with my board and it's with Turbo settings. The default core ratio settings are to sync all cores. This will bring your CPU outside of its rated spec and in the case of a i7 4790k it will cause your CPU to overheat and throttle at extreme loads. At first I thought I had a defective CPU, but after investigation the board is maxing out at 4.4ghz with 4 cores instead of 4.2ghz. With the correct settings my CPU does not throttle and stays within thermal limits. With an aftermarket cooler I can run at 4.4ghz on all cores, but just barely.This Turbo / stock CPU cooler issue should be a good topic for Anandtech to investigate. It seems many (all?) motherboards have wrong defaults for this and stock coolers cannot do the job.
varg14 - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
Really overheats on stock voltage? What Cooler you using ? Also have you tried undervolting a tiny bit?Zap - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
tl;drThis board (along with many other "enthusiast" boards) overclocks the CPU by default through "multicore enhancement." It has been around for a few years, and AnandTech even had an article about it.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6214/multicore-enhan...
mooninite - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
No, I specifically said *default* settings. Not with XMP. Not with Multi-core-enhancement. ASUS, Gigabyte, and others are, by default, syncing ratios on all cores.mooninite - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
The stock Intel cooler was what I originally had with my Impact and 4790k. Running an ffmpeg, h264 encode would reach 100C (the thermal limit) and throttle within a few minutes. I then purchased a ZALMAN CNPS8900 Extreme. This allowed ffmpeg to run while staying just under the 100C limit. After further reading of the Intel forum, with Intel support representatives replying, the motherboards are syncing all ratios, and a proper 44/44/43/42 ratio setting dropped temps even further to below 80C.Undervolting is next to impossible on stock clocks. I have my adaptive voltage set to -0.05v. Anything more and the system is not stable.
WithoutWeakness - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
I think ASUS assumes that if you're spending $200+ on one of their ROG-branded motherboards and $200-$300+ on a K-series unlocked processor then you're also probably spending $50+ on a CPU cooler that is good enough to cope with the additional heat of a few hundred MHz overclock and the potential corresponding voltage bump that comes with it.It might be an unfair assumption to expect all users to buy a separate CPU cooler but they're targeting a certain audience with their ROG hardware and know that most of those users won't just rely on the stock heatsink/fan to keep their CPU adequately cooled.
takeshi7 - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
I don't understand why manufacturers don't include 5.1 analog audio on high end ITX boards. If I can't have a sound card I'd at least like to have nice integrated audio.xenol - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
Many of them do have the full set of 5.1 with mic and line-in. I'm sure this board just multiplexes the ports.nathanddrews - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
My guess is that if you care that much about high quality audio, you would want to pass through to an external receiver/DAC/amplifier. From my experience onboard DAC always results in audible feedback. Digital out to an AVR resolves it.bigboxes - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
He said nice, not high end. I have great sounding audio. Granted it's not on-board. Rather it's a Soundblaster X-Fi card paired with some Swans. If you are that anal about audio then you are going to do as you prescribed. However, we all don't want receiver/DAC/amps on our desktops. Don't blame you if you do though just don't poo-pah the OP for making the suggestion.bigboxes - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
With such a small board there is no place for a external DAC add in card, hence your comment. I wasn't thinking about that.Pork@III - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
The parameters and component of test system are unreal experiment with board which mainly to relevant for HTPC.ExarKun333 - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
I like the error LED on the back plate. Very handy for a cramped build.Laststop311 - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
This is without a doubt the very best mini itx board on the market period. If I was going to build a mini itx system this is the board I would get. And for being the very best available the price isn't all that bad.Gigaplex - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
"However due to the detachable audio card, replacing it doesn't require a completely new motherboard."Unless they actually sell the audio cards separately, you're likely to need to replace the whole package anyway.
Laststop311 - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
You could find a used mobo for cheap on ebay by the time an audio card dued and just buy it for the audio card. Probably even be able to find boards that aren't working correctly with a salvageable audio card.Laststop311 - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
died*just4U - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
Tough call between this one and MSI's Z97i gaming ac. I'd say the two sit atop the heap as far as quality goes. I am actually not bothered by the price of either.. as your trying to go small but that doesn't necessarily mean a budget build. Curious what Gigabyte has in their pipeline.. but all in all I like what I see from Asus here.. especially where the power connectors are. Nice review Ian.Laststop311 - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
It's really not a tough call Asus are the ones who started using separate boards for the power delivery and they have the experience and know how to do it best. Before Asus did that manufacturers were just using rly skimpy cut back heavily power delivery so it would fit on the board. Rather than go that route asus pioneered using a separate board so they had the room to make a beefy power delivery design and not have to sacrifice any OC potential compared to a larger board. Also as this review shows the bios and the software that controls asus motherboards is more advanced and more technically capable than MSI's.The pcie-3.0 x4 slot for m2 ssd's is also huge. That's an incredible 4GB/sec of bandwidth. This also allows you to keep the build incredibly tiny as you can attach no storage drives other than the m2 card such as this one:
"The Samsung SM951 is expected to be NVMe compatible, and will be capable of up to 1,600/1,000 MB/s sequential reads/writes and 130K/100K IOPS 4K random reads/writes – slightly faster than the XP941 rated for 1,400 MB/s sequential reads. The drive is also NVMe low power (L1.2) certified and is rated to draw <10mW power at idle (probably DevSleep mode). Available in capacities up to 1TB"
So even with no 2.5" or 3.5" drives you can still have 1TB of storage space on a drive with 1600/1000 speeds 3x-4x faster than anything used now. This board is just the perfect starting point for an ultimate incredibly fast small form factor pc. With no 2.5" or 3.5" drives, no optical or any other outside media drive you only need enough space for a PSU (a small 600 watt 80+ gold silverstone sfx sized psu) your graphics card (a small mini itx sized gtx 970) and then since no optical or any other drives u can fit a nice 240/280mm rad on the top and you can overclock like you are inside a regular large tower.
You can build a really neat really powerful tiny mini PC and by using this board you end up with more power and features than even many ATX sized boards. This board allows you to go small without making a single real sacrifice and in most cases adds more features then many big boards. You can't go wrong with this board. Hell its even a nice board to choose even if you can fit an atx sized board. At 240 this board has the same features as atx sized boars that are 275+
Laststop311 - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Also since this is a mini itx board and haswell cpu's only have 20 pci-e lanes coming directly off it you can freely use the 4x m2 ssd slot and since there is only 1 pci-e expansion slot you don't have to worry about making any sacrifices since you are using the m2 slot you still get full 16x gpu bandwidth (even tho 8x is basically identical performance still nice to eek out that 1% better on 16x.)just4U - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
No .. it's still a tough call. I like both boards. :)dwade123 - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Stupid price. I rather get an x99 setup if i want to spend that much on a freaking motherboard.krazy_olie - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
No x99 itx motherboard exists....krazy_olie - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Picked up this board in a bundle.The fan headers is a bit of a stupid situation, on the plus side you get 3 headers in 2 locations. on the downside these aren't pwm. I have a fan plugged in to cha_fan3 and it runs at full whack and can't reduce the speed. I need to try channel 1 to see if it's a problem generally or just with the coolhub.
Worth noting that the z97i plus actually has pwm headers with fan xpert 3
leetruski - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Mind telling me where you found a bundle? I'm actually looking for one myself. Thanks.krazy_olie - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
ah, it was an overclockers.co.uk bundle on Cyber Monday. I'm in UKmapesdhs - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Interesting to compare to the Z97I-Plus, which is also a very good board. I built an HTPCwith this model, just a G3258 to begin with, 750 Ti, works very nicely indeed. It's also almost
$100 cheaper, money that could be spent on a better GPU, CPU, SSD, etc.
Ian.
krazy_olie - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Most people would be better served by the plus but these types of boards are often in bundles so it was at no extra cost to me. The overclocking features are a bit overwhelming. I've just activated the 2133 xmp profile on my memory and left it as it is for now. From what I can tell is that by default if I do this it activates the "free" 4x4400Mhz boost. I may attempt to do some sort of undervolting at some point.Was able to try out the headphone output and was pleasantly surprised. Bizarrely plugging in to the rear it detects something, gives the option of headphones then sets to speakers but on the front panel it works. Not really an issue but weird, it detected my sennheiser hd598 as needing the middle amplification, >64 Ohm, setting but I switched it down to "performance" as it was loud enough for my tastes.
Subjectively it sounds better than my late fiio e17, excellent soundstage and separation. I can certainly hold off buying a replacement headphone amp for quite some time so I've made my money back there already.
Had a play with the sound add ons and they are potentially useful, but for general use best to turn it all off. The audio visualiser is a curious thing... arguably it's a form a cheating if you can see where the sounds are coming from! I suspect I will have fun trying to get it to play nice with games. 3d sounds is so awkward since direct 3d sound was deprecated
Just hoping that I will have more luck controlling the 3 pin fan with cha_fan1 vs the coolhub, otherwise I will need to resort to resistor cables or a new fan. Will report later on...
krazy_olie - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
Chassis fan header 1 (CHA_FAN1) can control SC fans, seems like either an undocumented restriction on the coolhub or possibly a bug of sorts.Ronald Hummelink - Sunday, December 14, 2014 - link
I bought the same bundle from OCUK, and seems I can control both CHA1 and CHA2(Coolhub) fans fine. I just use custom fan profiles in BIOS, and both fans (and the cpu fan) follow CPU temperature fine.rakesh_hocrox - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
Check out the latest tech news about Google here: http://bit.ly/1yGNZCWSuperVeloce - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
Why are usb3 copy times that much slower on newer z97 chipsets?MajorDizaster - Saturday, March 14, 2015 - link
So, are you supposed to replace the screws on the CPU Power Daughter card heat sinks with longer screws to mount it to a case? Or do you only need to use the two free mounting holes?iLloydski - Monday, June 22, 2015 - link
i find it odd that nobody has talked about the fact that M.2 shares bandwidth with PCIe 3.0/2.0 X16 slot. Bandwidth on the PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 slot becomes x8 when M.2 device is inserted.i'd like to know the impact of this with the graphics card if decide to use M.2 SSD. Thanks, appreciate the feedback.
iLloydski - Monday, June 22, 2015 - link
nevermind, i found this.. http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GTX_980_...