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
EVGA Z77 Stinger Conclusion
EVGA has a reputation for being something a little special. The fan base is loyal, and despite the size of the company they have upgrade paths for their hardware (the EVGA Step-Up program) and deal with all RMA requests personally rather than through the reseller. The forums are always full of posts, and a lot of members also contribute their hardware and spare time for distributed computing projects such as Folding@Home or BOINC. EVGA’s main product line is in NVIDIA graphics cards, and their high end models, although expensive, are often pre-overclocked and sell like hot cakes. They hire top well-known overclockers to showcase how capable their products can be in the right hands.
The motherboard side is less lucrative. EVGA’s market share in the motherboard segment is tiny compared to ASUS and Gigabyte, and still small compared to MSI and Biostar. For a given chipset they rarely release more than three motherboards (e.g. X79 SLI, X79 FTW, X79 Classified or Z77 FTW, Z77 Stinger), and those motherboards are often late to launch and come with some easy-to-spot issues. Every so often they come out with something special (EVGA SR-2) which is hard to ignore.
When I approached EVGA to request a review sample of the Stinger, I had seen the leaked images online and it looked like a good product. I even posted them on AnandTech. When the sample came through the door and I saw the price, I was a little taken aback. $200 puts it as the most expensive mITX board on the market, even more so than the ASUS P8Z77-I Deluxe which uses a daughter PCB for power delivery. At the $200 price point, it was going to be a tough sell to all but EVGA enthusiasts.
For the green we get some ‘extra’ compared to most other mITX boards on the market. This means an Intel NIC, a total of six USB 3.0 ports, two more SATA 6 Gbps (in the form of eSATA), the socket placed at the top rather than the bottom, three fan headers and power/reset buttons with a debug LED. Unfortunately, most of the cheaper boards offer better audio than the Realtek ALC889, they offer a WiFi module included in the product, more video output connectivity, some offer an mSATA, a mini-PCIe, and substantially more IO on the back panel.
BIOS wise EVGA is at a disadvantage due to the size of the company, but the lack of XMP options in the release BIOS does not help much. Despite the two years since graphical BIOSes came into force, I have been told that an implementation may be coming with Haswell (and hopefully with a print screen option). The software side with EVGA also falls against the same hurdle, with only one utility that offers little – no BIOS update feature, no fan control, no network control, no power delivery control.
In terms of performance, all is right with the EVGA Z77 Stinger. We got a fair representation across the range of benchmarks with no out-of-the-ordinary bursts or dips apart from the 192 kHz audio test fail due to the ALC889.
As mentioned before, the EVGA Z77 Stinger is a hard sell, and at $200 it is not really doing itself any favors when compared side-by-side with the competition. There are motherboards out there that offer a lot more in terms of usability and experience, but with EVGA we do get that Step-Up program and direct dealing with RMA. Are these differences worth the $50-$55 jump up from an ASRock or an MSI? If the Z77 Stinger was around the same price as the Zotac, it might be worth a punt.
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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. :)