Gigabyte H77N-WiFi Review – First Look at Ivy Bridge with mITX
by Ian Cutress on November 6, 2012 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Gigabyte
- H77
- mITX
Design of a product is a key part in being able to sell it with positive results. This is why the Apple vs. Samsung case is so big – design wins like to propagate to competitors and the original designers want to hold onto their design as much as possible. We are not going to see anything like Apple vs. Samsung in the motherboard industry, but it would be interesting if that were the case.
But the point remains – as users, we want plenty of design wins to come from all sides. So what happens if a company launches a product with great gusto, but it acts more like a design flop? Is there oversight in the design from the manufacturer, or have other departments apart from design chipped in with their opinion. Ideally some of the features should be designed by market research, rather than by micro-management. Then again, it is also dependent on how the market research is carried out – choosing several PC enthusiasts and asking their opinion is not proper and methodical market research.
By the nature of being a technology reviewer, I am also a critic. I never mean my criticism to be rude, and always aim to provide reasoning and future suggestions about what I would like to happen. Thus after re-reading through this review, I am slightly taken aback by my level of criticism geared towards motherboard design. There are some odd design choices from the H77N-WiFi, such as the CPU/chipset orientation, the 4-pin CPU power connector, combining dual LAN with a WiFi module, no voltage options. But there are design wins – dual HDMI and DVI-I being the big one. There is also scope to change design – moving certain features to the rear may be a possibility as seen on other motherboards.
When I test a motherboard, I have an open test bed to allow cables to go where they please. This is normally oriented for ATX designs, where connectors are often in regular places. I had to move this around somewhat for the Gigabyte H77N-WiFi, dealing with SATA cabling at the top and restrictive CPU cooler options. If these are overlooked on the understanding that when it is in a case there is no cause for concern, then the Gigabyte H77N-WiFi offers a price competitive product.
For $120 we have a mITX board that gives an Intel WiFi Module with WiDi support, dual HDMI outputs combined with a DVI-I, and dual Realtek network ports. Performance wise I would easily suggest this motherboard paired with an i3-3225 to beat the A10-5800K in any single threaded workload you can throw at it. Multi-threaded workloads are more or less benchmark dependant.
I must apologize as I still have a backlog of Z77 mITX boards that I promised I would get through. Please stay tuned for those, as I also have Z77 OC boards and some FM2 coverage coming up. Stay tuned!
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Senti - Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - link
Default is teh default and stripped is after manually turning off unused features like network boot and various additional controllers boot roms that are needed only if you intent to boot from those devices.GoodBytes - Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - link
Ah Thanks,To be clear, these values are still with a dedicated graphic card, right? cause I know those add time to the POST process.
IanCutress - Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - link
Yes, these post times are with a GPU installed.dishayu - Wednesday, November 7, 2012 - link
Hey Ian, you mention "four SATA 4 Gbps" ports for H77 chipset on the first page. I'm assuming that's a typo and Intel haven't actually implemented a non-standard 4Gbps port?Dug - Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - link
All of your complaints sound like you aren't a typical mITX user. You are comparing against ATX boards? Why?Of course you can't put giant heatsinks on this, and why would you when you are testing an i3-3225 and its designed to go in a case that's 7". You couldn't anyway with 99% if mITX cases out there.
Test stability and reliability, how well the wireless works, ethernet, USB, and SATA performance.
Why do we need to see a benchmark of an i3225 against and Asus P9X79 Pro with an i7-3960X? This is a motherboard review, not a cpu review.
And what is with the game benchmarks? What video card did you use? Don't tell me you used a video card that's 3 times longer than the motherboard.
Sorry but this doesn't seem like a review for the intended audience of mITX.
crimson117 - Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - link
After all the notes about the odd component positioning and theories about how it might complicate the installation, he doesn't even try installing it in a real mITX case...Armourcore9brker - Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - link
I agree with this.About the complaints about component placement. That's dictated by the Intel socket pinout. See here: http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/...
Starting on page 94.
Essentially the entire pinout shows where components would be placed. There isn't the room like on ATX boards to route the traces to other parts and have it be all neat.
What Asus and EVGA had to do was to add more layers to the board to get the traces to not interfere with the PCIe signals. That in turn will increase cost.
IanCutress - Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - link
Then the option becomes to just do it, or do it right. Different motherboard manufacturers have different mandates when it comes to this, and it shows in the cost.Regarding benchmarks, I have these numbers in the database, and thus it is interesting to see the difference between the two. I'd rather have an excess of data points than a limited field of view. As for using a high end video card, the whole point of a motherboard review is to test the limits - make the motherboard be the limiting factor in all testing as much as possible. There are now plenty of cases that deal with long discrete GPUs so that is not an argument against using one, and when going around a large LAN event it is interesting to see a double digit percentage of mITX builds around a powerful GPU. Similarly these users are also using cases that can accommodate larger heatsinks.
"Sorry but this doesn't seem like a review for the intended audience of mITX." - I feel the market for mITX is larger than you think. This Gigabyte board was built at the request of a system integrator in Asia, who bought 10000+ units for a specific need. The result of spending the time and effort made Gigabyte release the product to the general market. What may have been the plan for that system integrator may not be the plan for users - particularly when it comes to that 4-pin CPU power placement.
EnzoFX - Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - link
I agree that mITX is flexible and can accommodate powerful gaming rigs. However I'd say that is the minority. My concern with my mITX builds is always a balance of feature set. Stability. mITX to me is taking the, as Anand calls it "device-ification" of computers into my own hands. They go in smaller cases, whose components won't be changed all that often, so stability and build quality is actually even more important to me. The other thing is heat, while this is characteristic of cases and component selection, I think it would help us greatly if we got these mITX boards tested in practical use cases as well.My personal annoyance is seeing 500W+ PSU's with mITX builds that don't go anywhere near even half that wattage.
The mITX reviewing can use a boost here. Usually I find myself looking for reviews of what do become widely recommended boards. Test the top contenders, I'm always hearing about that ASRock ITX board, that's the #1 recommended board I see recommended in forums. Gigabyte is a brand I rely on, so I welcome their reviews, so thanks.
Termie - Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - link
Ian - thanks for this review. I built up a system using AsRock's z77 ITX board, and was also puzzled by the socket placement, but ultimately not everything will be as neat as on a bigger board because there just isn't as much board edge space available. No matter what, at least one power cable will be stretched inelegantly across the board.A few comments:
(1) your OCCT load numbers with the 7970 appear to be incorrect - perhaps this was actually running on the internal HD4000, judging by the wattage.
(2) testing power consumption on a platinum PSU is a bit unrealistic, as there are no SFX platinum PSUs available, as far as I know, and while some ITX builds go into cases, like the Prodigy, that can hold an ATX PSU, the use of Platinum PSUs even in these builds is unlikely due to cost.