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
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly donating hardware for our test bed:
OCZ for donating the USB testing SSD
Micron for donating our SATA testing SSD
G.Skill for donating our memory kits
ASUS for donating AMD GPUs
ECS for donating NVIDIA GPUs
Rosewill for donating the 500W Platinum Power Supply
Test Setup
| Test Bed | |
| Processor |
Intel Core i3-3225 @ 3.3 GHz 2 Cores, 4 Threads |
| Motherboards |
Gigabyte H77N-WiFi MSI Z77IA-E53 Zotac Z77-ITX WiFi ASRock Z77E-ITX EVGA Z77 Stinger ASUS P8Z77-I Deluxe |
| Cooling | Intel Stock CPU Cooler |
| Power Supply | Rosewill SilentNight 500W Platinum |
| Memory | GSkill RipjawsX 2x4 GB DDR3-1600 9-9-9 |
| Memory Settings | XMP |
| Video Cards |
ASUS HD7970 3GB ECS GTX 580 1536MB |
| Video Drivers |
Catalyst 12.3 NVIDIA Drivers 296.10 WHQL |
| Hard Drive | OCZ Vertex 3 240GB |
| Optical Drive | LG GH22NS50 |
| Case | Open Test Bed - CoolerMaster Lab V1.0 |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit |
| SATA Testing | OCZ Vertex 3 128GB |
| USB 2/3 Testing | OCZ Vertex 3 240GB with SATA->USB Adaptor |
Power Consumption
Power consumption was tested on the system as a whole with a wall meter connected to the Rosewill SilentNight 500W Platinum power supply, while using a single 7970 GPU. This power supply is Platinum rated, and as I am in the UK on a 230-240 V supply, leads to ~90% efficiency > 100W, and 94%+ efficiency at 250W, which is suitable for both idle and GPU loading. This method of power reading allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency. These are the real world values that consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using this motherboard.
For a mITX board, 500W is potentially a little overkill, even with the efficiency values listed. As each of the motherboards tested are in the same environment, the qualitative differences between them are more important than the quantitative values themselves. Thus the board that is using the least power in our setup should also use the least power if a 120W pico PSU is used.
Out of the boards tested today, the ASUS uses the least power during loading, whereas the ASRock draws a little more than others while using a discrete GPU.
POST Time
Different motherboards have different POST sequences before an operating system is initialized. A lot of this is dependent on the board itself, and POST boot time is determined by the controllers on board (and the sequence of how those extras are organized). As part of our testing, we are now going to look at the POST Boot Time - this is the time from pressing the ON button on the computer to when Windows starts loading. (We discount Windows loading as it is highly variable given Windows specific features.) These results are subject to human error, so please allow +/- 1 second in these results.
All motherboards hit under the 12 second mark which is great to see.
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IanCutress - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
Gigabyte wanted their H77 reviewed instead, which we reviewed recently: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6427Athelstan - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
Thanks for the review. I'm curious why you mention the audio chip on all of these board. For the intended purpose, wouldn't the audio be over HDMI, making the onboard audio unused in most cases? Even then, all of the boards have optical out, making the audio chip to have very little to do other than to pass along the bitstream from the media thought the optical connection.IanCutress - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
The audio chip also controls the front panel audio, and even if the audio was going through the HDMI, external speakers for a HTPC may be used via the audio jacks. In my personal usage scenario, my video out is via DVI-D to a 2560x1440 Korean panel via a dGPU, meaning all my audio still goes through the normal audio jacks. The other reason is that if I did not mention it, someone in the comments would ask why wasn't the audio chip mentioned. There is a price difference between the ALC889, ALC892 and ALC898, though manufacturers obviously get these on bulk deals (or at a discount when bought with the Realtek 8111E/F) and I am not privy to that information.Ian
Taft12 - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
Speaking of audio, could you let us know the differences between those 3 Realtek audio chipsets? Is there any sound quality difference, or is it only features?mczak - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
The 892 has somewhat crappy ADC/DACs quality-wise (that said most likely signal routing etc. on the board will have a much bigger effect on sound quality than the quality of the DACs, so using a higher quality chip can still easily result in worse quality than using a cheap chip with more care taken). The 889 and 898 seem quite similar there on paper.I think just about the only thing you'd really miss is the dolby digital live / dts connect features (encode multichannel audio to digital if you're using the digital outputs). But these are pure software features, so you can get them with the 892 as well - I believe though the board manufacturers are more likely to license them with the more expensive chips (I don't know if you could "upgrade" your chip with unofficial means there...). Realtek actually seems to list different ordering numbers depending on these features - interestingly there while all 3 of these chips are listed as a version without any of DDL/DTS Connect, only the 889 has a version with both of them, while the 892 only has a version with DTS Connect, and the 898 only has the version without them - the datasheet still lists those features as optional however.so maybe they just stopped using different ordering numbers (the 889 clearly is the oldest of the 3).
Athelstan - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
*grins* Good point. If you don't mention it someone else would be asking for it.Stacey Melissa - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
I'm running the ASUS board, and installed the AI Suite for a different ASUS Z77 board in order to get access to Fan Expert 2, which has far better fan control than v.1. Wish I could remember which Z77 board it was, but all I did was check the download pages for various Z77 boards to find one that included AI Suite with Fan Expert 2.IanCutress - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
MSI include a program as part of the package to update the software, making sure you have the latest available. ASUS and Gigabyte need to do this ASAP, so people can take advantage of things like Fan Expert 2 without having to visit the website. System integrators often just install the drivers and software on the CD when selling a system, and then the user never updates it unless told to by either (a) friends or (b) the software itself.Ian
mfenn - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
Am I the only one who is getting tired of the liberal copy-pasting of content between motherboard (and SSD) reviews on this site? I don't need to waste my time reading about the MSI design competition in every single review.I understand the need to provide background information to readers who may not peruse every single review, but that's why Tim invented the hyperlink. Link to the old review or to a purpose-built "company profile" page.
Sabresiberian - Tuesday, January 1, 2013 - link
Adding info some may be familiar with is preferable to leaving it out. If you don't want to read it, then I suggest you just skim or skip it entirely. :)