ASRock Z77E-ITX Motherboard Review

We have tested a number of products from ASRock over the past couple of years and none of them have failed to impress. It's clear that they are gunning for the longer established brands such as Asus and Gigabyte and they now produce a full range of motherboards targeted at a wide range of audiences including budget focused users and keen overclockers. Today we are going to look at the ASRock Z77E-ITX motherboard, which is designed for those looking to build a powerful but compact system. It boasts an impressive specification which includes premium gold capacitors and an built in wireless card. We look forward to seeing how it fares in our tests. We will be using an Intel Core i7-3770K for our tests today. Features Premium Gold Caps Digi Power Design, 6 + 2 Power Phase Design Supports Dual Channel DDR3 2800+(OC) 1 x PCIe 3.0 x16 Slot, 1 x mSATA Connector, 1 x mini PCIe Slot PCIE Gigabit LAN Supports Intel® HD Graphics with Built-in Visuals Multi VGA Output options: DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort and D-Sub with the bundled DVI-to-D-Sub Converter 7.1 CH HD Audio with Content Protection (Realtek ALC898 Audio Codec), Supports THX TruStudio™ Supports ASRock XFast RAM, XFast LAN, XFast USB, OMG, Internet Flash, Dehumidifier, UEFI System Browser Supports Intel® Smart Connect, Intel® Rapid Start, Lucid Virtu Universal MVP Free Bundle : 1 x ASRock WiFi Module, 1 x ASRock WiFi 2.4GHz Antenna, CyberLink MediaEspresso 6.5 Trial, ASRock MAGIX Multimedia Suite ASRock supply the Z77E-ITX within a relatively large box for a mini-ITX motherboard, which is an indicator of the size of the bundle included within. The front features some logos illustrating various features of the motherboard and is decorated in a grey and black livery. Turning the box over reveals a detailed breakdown of the features and specifications of the motherboard and a small image of the unit itself. We are quite impressed by the quality of the packaging supplied by ASRock and we have no doubt that it will protect the motherboard well. We are quite impressed by the plentiful bundle that ASRock supply with the Z77E-ITX as everything we could ask for is included. It consists of a couple of user manuals, a software CD, two SATA cables, a Wi-Fi antenna and a DVI adapter. ASRock have decided to use a black and gold colour scheme for the Z77E-ITX which consists of a black PCB with black fittings and gold capacitors. There are also a few gold highlights scattered across the motherboard. We expect that this colour scheme will be admired by most people as the gold isn't intrusive and the black will compliment almost any other components you choose to install. It seems that ASRock has tried to make room for as many features as possible on the Z77E-ITX despite the compact mini-ITX form factor. There is even a small heatsink covering some of the power regulation circuitry next to the CPU socket. We will see if this helps the overclocking performance later in the review. The 8-pin CPU power connector is located just above this heatsink. The only slight issue with the CPU socket placement is that it's very close to the PCI Express x16 connector. This means that large coolers may obstruct this lane, preventing you from installing a graphics card. As a result of the form factor of the motherboard, the CPU socket sits lower than it would on an equivalent ATX motherboard. Above the CPU socket we find the majority of the motherboard components and connections. Along the top edge of the board there are four SATA connectors which are hooked up to the Intel Z77 chipset. Two of these support SATA-600 while the other two are restricted to SATA-300 speeds. The motherboard supports RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 as well as Intel Smart Response Technology, Intel Rapid Start Technology and Intel Smart Connect Technology. ASRock have thoughtfully included an mSATA connector on the back of the motherboard which supports speeds of up to 3.0 GB/s. We expect that a number of users will use this to enable Intel Smart Response Technology. We also find some other connections along the top edge of the motherboard including two USB2.0 front panel headers, a USB3.0 front panel header and two 4-pin fan headers. There is also a mini-PCIe wireless card installed on the motherboard which is a welcome addition and will be useful for quite a number of users. There are only two DDR3 RAM slots on the Z77E-ITX which are located along the right hand edge. These support up to 16 GB of non-ECC unbuffered memory with speeds of 2800+(OC)/2400(OC)/2133(OC)/1866(OC)/1600/1333/1066 MHz. Due to the size limitations of the mini-ITX form factor, the Z77E-ITX only features a single PCI Express x16 slot which is located along the bottom edge of the motherboard. As a result, this motherboard doesn't support any kind of dual graphics configuration. The rear I/O panel supports: 2 x Antenna Ports 1 x PS/2 Mouse/Keyboard Port 1 x DVI-I Port 1 x HDMI Port 1 x DisplayPort 1 x Optical SPDIF Out Port 2 x Ready-to-Use USB 2.0 Ports 1 x eSATA2 Connector 4 x Ready-to-Use USB 3.0 Ports 1 x RJ-45 LAN Ports with LED (ACT/LINK LED and SPEED LED) 1 x Clear CMOS Switch with LED HD Audio Jack: Rear Speaker / Central / Bass / Line in / Front Speaker / Microphone UEFI Interface ASRock have used their familiar UEFI interface for the Z77E-ITX. We love this interface and it's almost as good as the Asus UEFI which we regard to be the best on the market. The first page lists some basic information about the motherboard and the installed components. Most enthusiasts will head straight for the 'OC Tweaker' page which contains all the settings we could possibly ask for to squeeze every ounce of performance out of this motherboard. It also features an automatic overclocking feature which will be useful for less technically advanced users. Under the 'Advanced' tab we find a number of further pages which contain the non-overclocking BIOS settings. We can also access the ASRock Instant Flash utility from this page. On the 'H/W Monitor' page we can see some information about the system temperatures, voltages and fan speeds. We can also set the fan speeds here. The next two pages feature the boot and security options and the last page lets us exit the BIOS, either saving changes or discarding them. We can also reset the BIOS to the default settings here. Overclocking In the past we have had limited success overclocking with mini-ITX motherboard as the power regulation circuitry often isn't good enough to achieve a solid overclock. ASRock have clearly been trying to buck this trend though as the UEFI interface features all the overclocking settings we could ask for. First of all we decided to try out the automatic overclocking feature which is called 'Advanced Turbo 30'. With our Intel Core-i7 3770K this boosted the clock speed to 4.7 GHz using a baseclock of 100 MHz and a ratio of 47x. We were pleasantly surprised to find that this was completely stable during our tests. See validation here We weren't actually able to achieve a manual overclock better than the 4.7 GHz achieved by the automatic feature but this is still a very impressive result for a mini-ITX motherboard. We've tested a number of full size ATX motherboards and none of them hit 4.7 GHz with less effort. In this review we are going to benchmark the i7-3770K at reference clock speeds and when overclocked to 4.7 GHz. We used a Cooler Master TPC 800 CPU cooler for testing with one Be Quiet! Shadow Wings fan attached. Test System: Processor: Intel Core i7-3770K Motherboard: ASRock Z77E-ITX Cooler: Cooler Master TPC 800 (with single Be Quiet! Shadow Wings 120mm) Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-2 Memory: 8 GB G.Skill @ 1600 MHz 9-9-9-24 Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 6950 Power Supply: Thermaltake ToughPower XT 750W System Drive: Intel 520 Series 240 GB Monitor: Viewsonic VX2260WM Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) Software: PCMark 7 3DMark 11 SiSoft Sandra 2012 SP3 Cinebench R11.5 CrystalDiskMark Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6.5 VLC Media Player Performance Monitor Unigine Heaven Benchmark Super Pi 1.5 Mod CPUID Hardware Monitor CPU-Z DiRT 3 Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City 3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads. If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page. We see a decent boost in performance when we overclocked the system. Although the overall score doesn't change much. Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings. Again, we see a significant boost in performance when the system is overclocked. PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use. Here we can see how overclocking can yield a significant boost in system wide performance. Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand. Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk. Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable: Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems Multicore CPU support Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles) Powerful C++ API Comprehensive performance profiling system Flexible XML-based data structures This score reflects exactly what we would expect from our test system. SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting. It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc. Native ports for all major operating systems are available: Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86) Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64) Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64) Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01) Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02) All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of: SMP – Multi-Processor MC – Multi-Core SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86 IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit Some impressive results from the Z77E-ITX which show that it can compete in terms of overclocking performance with a number of full-size ATX motherboards out there. Cinebench R11.5 is the newest revision of the popular benchmark from Maxon. The test scenario uses all of your system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral “No Keyframes” animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores. In fact, CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor. Here we can see how hyper threading benefits performance in an application that is able to utilise multiple threads as we see better than four times scaling. Super Pi is used by a huge audience, particularly to check stability when overclocking processors. If a system is able to calculate PI to the 2 millionth pace after the decimal without mistake, it is considered to be stable in regards to RAM and CPU. In this test we can see how the single threaded performance improves when overclocked. CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64. Today we are testing with the Samsung 830 Series 256 GB solid state drive. Here we can see why it's essential to connect a high speed SSD to a SATA-600 port on the motherboard so bandwidth isn't limited to 300 MB/s. No performance related issues with the ASrock motherboard. CyberLink MediaEspresso 6.5 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats. Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology. New and Improved Features Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously. Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention. Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices. Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment. Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A. Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier. For our testing today we are converting a 1.09GB 720p MKV file (44mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version of this program with full hardware acceleration enabled. In this test we can see how overclocking can benefit performance in real world applications. Many people who have media systems will be familiar with the Matroska (.mkv) file format which is often used for high definition video. In this test we will be using VLC Media Player to play a 1080P MKV file while recording CPU usage using Performance Monitor. We see a very slight improvement in performance in this test when the system is overclocked. DiRT 3 was released quite recently and has received a lot of praise from gamers and reviewers across the globe. It is the latest iteration of the Colin McRae Rally series, despite Codemasters dropping the Colin McRae branding. It supports DirectX 11 which enhances detail and brings a number of other visual enhancements to the gaming experience. Here we see a slight bump in performance when the system was overclocked. Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City is a standalone compilation of the DLC episodes forGrand Theft Auto IV, containing both The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony on one disc. It was released alongside the DLC release of The Ballad of Gay Tony on 29 October 2009 for the Xbox 360 and released on 13 April 2010 for Microsoft Windows and Playstation 3. It does not require a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV to play, nor is an Xbox Live or PSN account necessary (except for multiplayer). The engine is still extremely demanding for this game – even now for the newest hardware. The latest version changes some of the rendering calls and is used partially within the latest Max Payne engine. The settings we used to test this game are displayed in the screenshot below. In this test we see a more substantial boost in performance when overclocked compared to DiRT 3 as performance in this game is more heavily dependent on CPU processing power. We measured the power consumption of our entire test system at the wall while loading the CPU using Prime95 and GPU using FurMark. We recorded results with the system at reference clock speeds and when overclocked to 4.7 GHz. These results are exactly what we'd expect from our test system. It's not very often that we get excited when a mini-ITX motherboard passes through our labs as they don't usually offer much in terms of overclocking performance. For this reason we were very surprised when we started testing the ASRock Z77E-ITX and managed to hit 4.7 GHz with our Intel Core i7-3770k. Even more impressive is the fact that this performance is accessible to everyone as we managed to achieve this clock speed using the automatic overclocking feature. This is something that isn't even possible with many full-size ATX motherboards so it is a heck of an achievement for a mini-ITX board. ASRock haven't compromised in any other areas either as the Z77E-ITX is very well featured. Some of the most interesting features include an on board Wi-Fi card and an mSATA connector which is ideal for enabling Intel Smart Response technology. We would recommend this motherboard to anyone looking to build a very powerful HTPC or compact gaming PC as it offers amazing performance in a compact form factor. The only negative aspect of the board in our opinion is the CPU socket placement which isn't ideal for installing large heatsinks as they can easily obstruct the PCI Express x16 lane. We would highly recommend using something such as the Corsair H60 which doesn't take up much room around the CPU socket. This is something which affects most mini-ITX motherboards, though, so it doesn't lower the overall score. This is just one of the necessary compromises when moving to the mini ITX platform. It's not unusual for you to pay a slight premium for a mini-ITX motherboard when compared to similarly featured micro-ATX or ATX motherboards due to the complications of cramming so many components into such a small space. The ASRock Z77E-ITX can be yours for a shade under £123.98 from Overclockers UK meaning it's priced similarly to many mini-ITX alternatives. In this regard we feel it is a bargain. Pros Excellent overclocking performance. Attractive colour scheme. On board Wi-Fi card. Generous bundle. Reasonably affordable. Cons Limited space for large CPU coolers. KitGuru says: An excellent motherboard that we wouldn't hesitate to recommend as a first choice.

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ASRock Z77E-ITX Motherboard Review

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