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
MSI Z77IA-E53 Conclusion
My main criticism with the MSI Z77IA-E53 is similar to many of the other mITX motherboards on the market – the location of the socket on the board is a little insane. By being right up against the memory slots and the PCIe slots, it means that we are restricted to the Intel specifications for coolers in the x-y directions, and we cannot have large GPUs with a backplate for a mITX gaming system. Trying to fit the latest MSI Lightning GPU as well as an overclocked CPU that is not on an All-In-One liquid cooling system would seem like a tough ask. The location of the socket leads to another issue – the placement of the CPU power connector. As seen on other mITX boards with this configuration, the CPU power is found in an awkward place above the PCIe and near the rear IO. This means any cable has to either stretch over the mITX board (bad for airflow) or stretch over a GPU. Unless the PSU is coming from above, it can cause issues in building a system.
Socket placement aside, MSI have made other design decisions – by placing the on-board battery onto the back of the IO panel with adhesive should leave some PCB free for extra controllers or placement, but yet we get just the chipset standard. One of the SATA ports is partitioned off into an mSATA/mPCIe slot, leaving the gap open from some additional functionality at the discretion of the user. In terms of audio/network, we get a Realtek combo in the form of an ALC898 and the 8111E. The rear IO is also a little baffling – MSI have gone with a HDMI and VGA port, compared to some other manufacturers going dual HDMI and DVI-I to cover all the bases. Instead we get a ClearCMOS button on the IO, but no power/reset buttons or debug LED like on the Zotac.
Performance wise, the MSI stands up with the rest of the mITX boards in most of the tests. Normally we see a motherboard with monitoring software fail in the DPC Latency test, but the MSI Z77IA-E53 kept under 200 microseconds easily. The only serious downfall is an issue systemic with all MSI 7-series boards I have tested – the USB 2.0 speed. For whatever reason, we get only 25 MBps read/write on this board, compared to the 30-34 MBps we expect and get on every other manufacturer. This is not a deal breaker though.
In buying the MSI we get a nice looking BIOS and a good software package, but there needs to be something more to take my hard earned green – the wow factor of mITX is not enough, as every other manufacturer has that as well. When I compare connectivity against the other motherboards that have dual HDMI, personally I sway over to them rather than the MSI. The MSI is a nice board to play with, but it has one issue – the competition.
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Bullwinkle J Moose - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
Hey yeah, Ian haz a good pointThat Crappy Gigabyte H61n-USB3 doesn't have Chipset USB3
But it does however boot just fine to a USB3 Windows to go drive at USB3 speeds
It also boots to Linux and XP due to the Non-Locked down Bios so we wouldn't want that either would we
and it takes a full 9 seconds to boot XP compared to the super de duper fast 7 second Windows 8
So we should spend more money and get locked into a closed system
After all, that is the future!
Limitations are fun so be happy as we lock down the Internet as well
After all, there are scarey Monsters out there
A man has to know his limitations
Clint Eastwood
Bullwinkle J Moose - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
Ian haz a good point about the memory tooThat Gigabyte H61 board only takes up to 16GB of RAM
How much do these Z77 boards take by the way?
Was it this site or Maximum PC where the reviewers stated that in everyday use, you will notice no difference in speed between Sata 2 & 3 when you are using the latest and greatest SSD so I probably don't need the RAID capability on my H61 either
Keep up the good work Ian
Death666Angel - Wednesday, January 2, 2013 - link
It seems that someone just discovered sarcasm. Good for you!mczak - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
H61 is not limited to one single sided DIMM per channel, double sided are just fine. It only accepts one per channel (at least it's specced that way) but since none of these mini-ITX boards have more than two memory slots this wouldn't matter at all here (max memory is still 2x8GB regardless).Frankly I'm not sure losing PCIe 3.0 is a big deal with mini-itx boards in any case but either way it isn't exactly true there are h61 boards supposedly supporting this (as it's got nothing to do with the chipset anyway all the pcie 3.0 signals coming directly from the cpu, though it would require bios support).
This leaves us with losing SATA 6 Gbps - this might indeed make some minimal difference in real world, provided you use a SSD and not a HD.
The major point imho (aside from overclocking) would be missing USB 3.0, which obviously makes a big difference when using external harddisks etc. Granted that could be done with separate usb controller but probably not a good idea since space is limited.
H61 IIRC also will lose the possibility of using 3 display outputs simultaneously. Maybe something like H77 would make more sense for mini-ITX as it pretty much only loses overclocking (plus the ability to split the 16 x pcie 3.0 lanes into 2x8 though I guess this has nothing to do with the chipset itself really, but in any case it won't be missed on mini-itx). So if you don't want to overclock, you wouldn't miss anything at all with H77 on a mini-itx board.
Etern205 - Saturday, January 5, 2013 - link
I also notice that as well, most sites will only review Z77 mITX boards instead of H61 or H77. Not all will need a Z77, Z77 is mostly for enthusiast or for those who are into the technical stuffs. For the average Joe or Jane any mITX board will do. If you tell them it's H61 or Z77, they probably won't care too much on the difference.piroroadkill - Wednesday, January 2, 2013 - link
You can't easily upgrade the chipset later. With a small up-front investment, you get the full feature set, and why not?Bullwinkle J Moose - Sunday, January 6, 2013 - link
Oh Boo Hoo, I can't easily upgrade to an overclocking chipset or void the warranties of my hardware componentsI am just stuck with a totally stable system
Boo Hoo
How can I possibly break this ?
What has the World become ?
Poor me
Boo Hoo
Bullwinkle J Moose - Sunday, January 6, 2013 - link
Why not?Because the H61 is exactly what I wanted
and anything else is NOT !
can you hear me now?
EVGA KINGPIN - Friday, November 19, 2021 - link
I still use my Z77 FTW board , have had it running without turning it off since 2015. evga is the best ,also my EVGA GTX 980 KINGPIN is still running strong,,,thanks EVGA for quality products, JRTsherlockwing - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
Where is the Gigabyte?