Z97 Mini-ITX Review at $140: ASRock, MSI and GIGABYTE
by Ian Cutress on July 23, 2014 3:00 AM ESTCPU Benchmarks
Readers of our motherboard review section will have noted the trend in modern motherboards to implement a form of MultiCore Enhancement / Acceleration / Turbo (read our report here) on their motherboards. This does several things – better benchmark results at stock settings (not entirely needed if overclocking is an end-user goal), at the expense of heat and temperature, but also gives in essence an automatic overclock which may be against what the user wants. Our testing methodology is ‘out-of-the-box’, with the latest public BIOS installed and XMP enabled, and thus subject to the whims of this feature. It is ultimately up to the motherboard manufacturer to take this risk – and manufacturers taking risks in the setup is something they do on every product (think C-state settings, USB priority, DPC Latency / monitoring priority, memory subtimings at JEDEC). Processor speed change is part of that risk which is clearly visible, and ultimately if no overclocking is planned, some motherboards will affect how fast that shiny new processor goes and can be an important factor in the purchase.
From our results it would seem that the MSI and GIGABYTE both enabled MCT by default, whereas the ASRock does not.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores.
Due to the speed difference at a full multithreaded load, the ASRock takes a back seat compared to our other Z97 results.
Compression – WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
Nothing much separates the three mini-ITX motherboards in WinRAR
Image Manipulation – FastStone Image Viewer 4.9: link
Similarly to WinRAR, the FastStone test us updated for 2014 to the latest version. FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and thus single threaded performance is often the winner.
While the MSI and GIGABYTE match their fast Z97 brethren, the ASRock seems to be slightly down here.
Rendering – PovRay 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision RayTracer, or PovRay, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
While the ASRock had the lowest power consumption of the three, that translates into slightly lower performance as shown in POV-Ray.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v0.9.9: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. The principle today is still the same, primarily as an output for H.264 + AAC/MP3 audio within an MKV container. In our test we use the same videos as in the Xilisoft test, and results are given in frames per second.
The difference in MCT makes the ASRock fall behind in low-quality conversion, but for 4K60 video, all three perform similarly.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
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pierrot - Wednesday, July 23, 2014 - link
Great article, you read my mind with this, Im planning on an ITX form factor for my next buildZap - Wednesday, July 23, 2014 - link
Do it! Unless you have a need for more than six HDDs or more than one graphics card there is little reason to go bigger and have a mostly empty case.Alternately there is also the little loved micro ATX. Not as "normal" as ATX and not as sexy as mini ITX, but IMO a very good alternative that gives you room for dual graphics, or some expansion cards.
PICman - Wednesday, July 23, 2014 - link
Excellent review. Every time I see a review of ITX boards I'm amused by the giant 2x24 power connector plus an additional 2x2 or 2x4. Every other connector on the original IBM PC has an updated version. Has there been any discussion of a smaller power connector?Aikouka - Wednesday, July 23, 2014 - link
I was working in a Dell workstation a few weeks back, and I was rather surprised to see that it didn't have a standard ATX power cable. Its power cable was probably about half the size, and if I remember correctly, the motherboard also provided a connector for a cable that provided power to the hard drive(s).I would definitely like to see someone be willing to revamp the power delivery as dealing with that monstrous cable is definitely my least favorite part -- especially on cases with too little room in the back!
DanNeely - Wednesday, July 23, 2014 - link
Dell's been using proprietary cables on/off for the last 20 years. I'm glad the current version uses different connectors though. IN the past they've had proprietary cables using AT or ATX standard sockets but with different pinouts so you'd smoke your hardware if you didn't realize it and tried to use a standard PSU as a replacement.DanNeely - Wednesday, July 23, 2014 - link
I've jumped on my soapbox more than once grumbling about the stupidity of a cable that mostly provides 3/3/5v power when the death of legacy PCI has removed the last significant 3.3v component and 5v is only still used for USB more than once in the comments here.But between the failure of BTX and the fact that the desktop market is generally seen as being in terminal decline I'm not optimistic about the likelihood of ever getting a 12V centric CTX PSU standard. If pigs ever do fly though, instead of mashing the entire 4/8pin 12v connector into the cut down remnant of the 24pin cable, I'd rather see the main connector only have enough 12V to run an full power CPU+IGP (or lower power CPU + discrete GPU) based system, with the extra power for a full power CPU and PCIe GFX card in a separate and optional cable: Both to keep cost down for lower end systems, and because the 24 wire cable is a major pain to route because of its thickness.
PICman - Wednesday, July 23, 2014 - link
While we're dreaming, we might as well make the voltage 24 or 48 V to reduce the current and improve the efficiency of the switching power supply.DanNeely - Wednesday, July 23, 2014 - link
Maybe...Just rationalizing the pinout would be a much lower impact change and could be done with adapter cables in both directions for reasonably current hardware (most of the 3.3/5v capacity in the 24pin is unused on both sides of the cable).
Unless PCIe refreshed to use the higher voltage as well (and for a number of transition years in any case) we'd still need to provide a lot of 12V power. The USB charging committee's one cable to bind them all goals include 5A@2v power (for faster tablet charging and for low power laptops) which'd bring an additional long term need for significant amounts of 12v into the system. They also want a 5A@20v step for mainstream laptops; so if we did shift to a higher DC voltage that might be a better option instead.
The_Assimilator - Friday, July 25, 2014 - link
24VDC or even better, 48VDC needs to become the new industry standard immediately. When you have a card like the 295X2 that requires 600W but can only pull that over a 12V line (=50 amps!!!), you have an obvious problem. It's one I fear only Intel can solve, the question is do they have the determination to do it?Personally I believe that the PC industry will embrace a new power delivery standard. It means everything will have to be redesigned, which means they get to sell more products. The successor to ATX (which is not BTX) could very well be the boost the PC industry's been looking for.
Mr Perfect - Thursday, July 24, 2014 - link
If they ever did change things, any reason why they couldn't just pump in one 12v plug and then let the mother board do DC-to-DC conversion for other voltages? Smaller embedded boards do this, but I don't know if it would scale up well.