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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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. :)