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
Zotac Z77-ITX WIFI BIOS
Since the inception of a graphical interface for a BIOS, we have had several attitudes towards the design by motherboard manufacturers:
a) Do Nothing
b) Change the colors and reorganize menus
c) Create a different feel, make the changes easier to comprehend
d) Embrace a graphical BIOS and shift the paradigm to an interactive experience
Ideally, we would want all motherboard manufacturers to take to option (d), allowing all users to have a prod and a play with what could be a very interesting interface. Only two experiences I have had ever come close to (d) – the games given in the early MSI P67 BIOSes, and my brief foray into an Intel Z77 BIOS. Apart from this, we are stuck with (a) to (c) for the time being.
For Zotac, writing a novel BIOS can be tough. Zotac is a relatively small player in the motherboard industry with a single-digit percentage in terms of market share, and I would not be surprised if they employed more than a handful of BIOS engineers that actively upgrade the BIOS. If anything, they are more than likely stuck writing code for new models or releasing patches rather than updating. As a result, Zotac fits firmly in the (b) menu of the list above.
Being in the (b) section is not all bad – Biostar have had a fair crack at it in a similar position and have come out with something just about useable but looks nice (as a personal subjective opinion). For Zotac, and this Z77-ITX WiFi, we get a selection of different colored text on a JPEG/PNG style background:
(Apologies for the quality of the images – Zotac are also one of the few motherboard manufacturers without a ‘F12 – Screen to USB’ button which optimizes this part of the review.)
My main issue with a multicolored background stems from my slight level of colorblindness. It deeply affected my ability to select options in an ECS BIOS a few months back, and while it does not affect me here to the same extent, the effect of having white text over a yellow background without a text border can sometimes make text difficult to see. I would chalk this up as a basic design error (like red text on a green background) systemic of an engineer being told to ‘give the BIOS some style’. It certainly has more style than a white-on-black or white-on-blue BIOS of old, but it is not executed as perfectly as one may have imagined.
As for the functionality of the BIOS itself, the main screen above does a good job of informing the user when they enter the BIOS and land on the ‘Main’ page. We get the motherboard model and BIOS version, CPU information and memory size/speed. All that is missing is perhaps a temperature or voltage (or two).
For overclocking, we get the X-Setting menu:
Rather than an endless list of options, Zotac have decided to place overclocking options in separate menus. Everything voltage related gets placed out in this main menu, but frequency settings are partitioned off into separate CPU, iGPU and Memory menus.
A good thing about the Zotac BIOS is that each option has an associated help description in the top right, and each setting will make sense to any user who has overclocked before. Raise the multiplier, perhaps raise the voltage, adjust LLC + power settings as necessary.
Unfortunately there is a little element of confusion in the Zotac BIOS. Some of the CPU overclock settings listed above are duplicated poorly in the Advanced -> CPU Configuration menu. As you can see below, despite the Core Ratio options being part of this menu, they are not configured properly to take into account the values found in the X-Setting section:
In the Advanced menu, we get the usual array of controller options and configuration sub-menus. The important thing to note is the default setting for SATA ports. In 2012 (and for most of 2011) it has become the de-facto standard to make the SATA Mode for the ports to be AHCI as every HDD and SSD sold today can take advantage of AHCI and a new OS is often installed on a newer system. Either Zotac did not get that memo or someone at HQ is not in the loop with modern system construction, because we get IDE as standard. Please make sure you remember to change this on your new build (and each time you might have to clear the CMOS).
Due to the two fan headers on board, we get a small about of fan control in the BIOS:
The fan control allows for a basic type of gradient to be defined, although as shown above the ‘final’ temperature is not possible to be chosen, suggesting that the BIOS uses the TJMax value of the processor to fully ramp up the fan. The system fan header gets a straight forward constant fan speed at the users’ discretion. [Insert my consistent rant regarding fan settings here.]
The last thing to mention in the BIOS is the boot override feature, which is becoming the norm on most motherboards and I am glad to see Zotac use it. With this feature we can select a single device to boot from as a one-time-only situation – useful for booting from USB.
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mike_b - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
Interesting article, but I have to ask why would someone spend more for a Z77 chipset when using 'just' an i3? Surely a much cheaper H61 chipset could do the job admirably, and at much lower cost.Z77 makes sense if you're overclocking, which is excluded from this test...
IanCutress - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
H61 has no chipset USB 3.0, no chipset SATA 6 Gbps, and you are limited to PCIe 2.0. H61 is also technically limited to one single sided DIMM per channel, and no SATA RAID. There's also SRT to consider, that would be advantageous with the ASRock and the mSATA on the rear.Ian
mike_b - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
It might make an interesting comparison to see what net advantage is gained with the added features of the Z77 chipset compared with the H61. If budgets are limited the ~100 dollar cost difference between the Z77 and H61 mainboards makes a big difference; that money saved could be put into something which makes more of a performance difference (SSD rather than HDD for example).Anandtech is one of the best tech sites around, you guys do a great job. I do sometimes see though an emphasis on more expensive products when in terms of real-world performance you could get almost the same thing at a much cheaper price. Might be worth mentioning somewhere.
Not least because with yet another new socket coming with Haswell all these 1155 boards will be seen as out of date soon anyway.
IanCutress - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
Once we get into the swing with Haswell, we will hopefully covering the whole spectrum. Though it is worth noting that motherboard manufacturers, want to put their best foot forward, and would prefer their halo/channel boards get covered before their OEM / low end offerings. Hence this is why you rarely see many mainstream reviews that are not from forums dedicated to the market segment and users testing their own equipment. We are hoping to rectify the balance in due course. If there are any specific products you might want us to test or examine, drop me an email and I'll see what I can put in my schedule (as full as it is[!]) :)Ian
StormyParis - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
This is a major issue, not limited to motherboards: whenever I'm looking for something middle of the road or outright cheap, I can't find reviews.These Z77 MBs are a nice example: even though I'm recommending/building PCs regularly, most of them mini-ITX, I never came across a use case for Z77. Nobody apart from teens that still have something to prove overclocks anymore. People who want to do multi-GPU get a big case, and a big board. Are we supposed the extrapolate that the makers of good Z77 boards also make good H77 and H61 boards ?
I understand you've got to make do with what you're given by the OEMs. And that reviews was very good, as usual. Pity it is irrelevant ?
Tech-Curious - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
That's an interesting observation. I have to say, I never noticed a significant lack of coverage for low-to-mid-range components (either in general or on Anandtech in particular), until this Fall, when I was in the market for a lower end motherboard.I guess I just always gravitated to higher end mobos before. Or maybe the coverage for such products was more comprehensive years ago. My memory's foggy, so it's hard to say.
In any case, motherboards appear to be the exception. If anything, I think the internet has generally grown more bullish on low-to-mid-range CPUs and GPUs in recent years (probably, in part, as a result of the stagnating console situation, which results in stagnating system requirements for games).
But all of that rambling aside, yeah. It'd be nice to see more diverse motherboard analysis. When I bought a b75 a couple of months ago, I literally couldn't find a review for that chipset. It wasn't a big deal; it's not like b75's features are any great mystery, after all -- but it is a little nettlesome to trip over sixty bajillion z77 reviews when there's nary peep about any other chipset.
In other news, Ian's review is a good one -- and given that I've been a faithful user of Asus motherboards for the last 15 years, it's nice to see them take home the prize. :)
Etern205 - Saturday, January 5, 2013 - link
My guess would be, why review a cheap board when majority of the readers here won't even bother buying it?And as for Asus boards, I've heard, they do something called based-line features. This means all boards from the bottom of the range to the top (Intel B75-Z77) will have the same base-line features, other features are just added like BT, WiFi, extra lan, etc.
Tech-Curious - Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - link
Yes, I think the issue is that (at least with respect to Intel chipsets) low-end motherboards don't support overclocking. So they're both less interesting to review (fewer measurable differences in performance among different models), and they're less appealing to the presumed audience of sites like Anandtech.Still, the B75 is a perfectly good chipset. If you aren't heavily invested in overclocking, z77's advantages are likely wasted on you. Personally, I'm well beyond my overclocking days; I just don't have the time or the patience to go through the almost endless tuning process anymore. (Even if you find a stable OC at the outset, it can become unstable later, and/or a given application might expose instability that stress testing didn't, weeks or even months down the road).
jonjonjonj - Friday, January 4, 2013 - link
just cause you don't overclock doesn't mean other people don't. why wouldn't you? because you want to get the fastest cpu that you can afford means you have something to prove? some people are just idiots.Zap - Monday, December 31, 2012 - link
But there isn't a $100 difference between H61 and Z77. There is a cheaper Gigabyte Z77 ITX board that's only around $60 more than the cheapest H61 ITX board, and it was even on sale recently for another $13 off making it less than $50 difference.Alternately one can go the H77 ITX route and get all the Z77 goodies except for overclocking, for around $30 less than the cheapest Z77 ITX. I think $30 more than H61 is reasonable for those extra features, plus guaranteed out-of-the-box BIOS support for Ivy Bridge.
I do agree with your (mike_b) first post regarding the choice of CPU used. Ian Cutress, didn't you have a spare K CPU laying around? There are so many people building overclocked ITX rigs these days. I did in a Silverstone SG05 with low profile air cooler to hit 4.2GHz. Plenty of others use the Bitfenix Prodigy and liquid cooling to hit clocks normally reserved for ATX rigs. Another review site (Tweaktown) tested overclocking on Z77 ITX boards and the ASRock hit near 4.8GHz. THAT'S what I want to see.
Of course this AnandTech roundup has some very useful information too, such as DPC latency tests and POST times. Keep up the good work there! But please, know your audience. Next time if the board is supposed to be overclockable, test that feature.
Maybe there can be a companion article about overclocking and heatsink clearance? Would be a shame to not overclock this nice collection of Z77 ITX boards.