Zotac Z68ITX-A-E Wifi Review - Mini-ITX meets Z68
by Ian Cutress on September 22, 2011 10:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Mini ITX
- ZOTAC
- Z68
With the BIOS multiplier issue, I requested a new BIOS from Zotac that follows Intel specifications. This was so I could rerun all the benchmarks and find out where the Z68ITX-A-E actually lies in comparison to the other boards.
Zotac got back to me quite quickly with an internal BIOS (which is now available as a beta version online). As there is no utility in the BIOS to update, I used the Windows update tool. It was a fairly straightforward process; however it seemed that something went wrong and the board failed to POST. It wouldn’t do anything and gave random codes on the debug LED – however it was able to boot from a USB.
I must stress that this was probably a freak event, and Zotac suggested I use their DOS flash utility to update the BIOS using a bootable USB key that went to the command prompt. After a long while of searching, I found this guide, and created a USB key and flashed the 2K110809 beta BIOS without issue.
This new BIOS has some minor changes, such as XMP support, following the Intel specifications for boost multipliers and CPU usage, CPU Vcore control, and deep S3 control. However, I found another issue with my board. The 2nd DDR3 slot was not reading any memory, and whenever it was populated, would cause the motherboard to enter an infinite reset cycle.
This limits the board to one DDR3 slot, and has a direct impact on some of the benchmarks, especially memory intensive ones like Sorenson Squeeze and gaming, which benefit more from dual channel memory.
With this unfortunate turn of events, it does leave the Zotac results in some sort of limbo. While it’s unfair to compare the original BIOS results to other motherboards without this issue, the benchmarks run using single channel memory are also at a significant disadvantage and does not represent truly where this board stands performance-wise compared to others.
Ultimately, the best result for consumers is the ability for high speed which the shipping BIOS gives, even if it is outside of Intel specifications, and I would recommend (so would Zotac until the beta BIOS gets a full release) to stay with the shipping BIOS until such time.
Both the original BIOS and the new beta BIOS results (although in single channel memory mode) are given in the relevant benchmarks in this review.
Edit: It has come to our attention that this BIOS is now gone on full release since our testing.
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dac7nco - Thursday, September 22, 2011 - link
I think at this point Zotac has proven that they either don't care about proper MB design, or they just don't care. ASRock has a cheap mITX Z68 board... what was the problem in reviewing that? The fact that a reputable place like Anandtech goes anywhere near Zotac's boards makes me wonder.Daimon
EnzoFX - Thursday, September 22, 2011 - link
I agree, Zotac boards are overrated and overpriced. They care more about how their specs look on paper. Not a brand I'd recommend or read about in a review =P, unless they seriously step things up in regards to their BIOS and reliability.Ananke - Thursday, September 22, 2011 - link
I completely understand that this is a great, feature full board. However, in my sole opinion, it is too expensive for the targeted market. Why would somebody use this plus at least a $100 processor for a HTPC, when the same can be done with $300-$400 budget laptop /which comes with the Win OS btw/, or less than $100 AMD E-350 setup?Good for the consumer, since it offers a choice. I guess the same type of people who buy BMW Mini - an expensive pretend-to-be sport car, would buy this too.
DaveSimmons - Thursday, September 22, 2011 - link
The target is a small-form-factor _gaming_ PC not a simple HTPC -- for a HTPC you don't need Z68 to allow overclocking am i5-2500K. For pure HTPC use a H61/H67 motherboard and possibly nothing more than a socket 1155 Pentium CPU is enough.I wouldn't buy one that always runs my CPU out of spec though.
Ananke - Thursday, September 22, 2011 - link
Dave, small form factor gaming PC is an oxymoron. Where are you going to put a high end GPU card on this board? Playing WoW on integrated graphics is not "gaming" for God's sake. Hence my thought, for $170 this board is worthless. It might be interesting if it costs $70 or less.Mr Perfect - Thursday, September 22, 2011 - link
People build plenty of small form factor gaming PCs. Get yourself a Silverstone Sugo 5 or 7 case and you can put any dual slot card you want in it.Breathless - Thursday, September 22, 2011 - link
You don't know what you are talking about. I have this very board in a Lian Li PC-Q08B with an Asus GTX 580 Direct CUii, 2600k, 8GB's of ram and several SSD's. It is fully acceptable to say I have a small form factor gaming PC.DaveSimmons - Thursday, September 22, 2011 - link
As they said, Silverstone and Lian-li both make SFF gaming cases for mini-ITX, and you can put a GTX 560 ti or AMD 6870 in all of them, or even a higher-end card in a couple of them.You can even buy prebuilt gaming systems from CyberPowerPC in the SG07 case (LAN Party EVO Mini).
Times change, your SFF knowledge is a little out of date.
Rick83 - Thursday, September 22, 2011 - link
Gigabyte has been doing something similar on their Cougar Point boards all summer (now the first BIOS versions fixing this are finally coming out)There, once you enabled XMP, the CPU was automatically overclocked and overvolted using, afaik, the same turbo-tweak as on this Zotac.
Not sure what they've been thinking.
TrackSmart - Thursday, September 22, 2011 - link
I understand the need to have comparable test conditions for testing the performance of motherboards. That being said, it would be interesting to many of us to see what you can realistically get away with (in terms of a gaming PC) using this form factor and a small form factor case to match... Running at stock speeds, when gaming, would a decent SFF case be able to keep up with the heat of a Z68 processor plus a mid-range GPU? What about an overclocked Z68 plus whatever the most powerful GPU that would fit the case? Is this a viable platform for that kind of computing power to begin with? If not, then the overclocking results aren't very relevant to your testing.Keep up the good work on the motherboard reviews. And if it seems feasible, maybe you could cover some of the questions above in a "SFF/Mini-ITX gaming system" article. The key question being whether a SFF gaming rig is an oxymoron.