ASUS Z87I-Deluxe Mini-ITX Intel Motherboard Review By David Ramsey Manufacturer: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Product Name: LGA1150 Intel Motherboard Model Number: Z87I-Deluxe UPC: 886227379767 Price As Tested: $189.99 Newegg / Amazon Full Disclosure: ASUS provided the product sample used in this article. It seems full-sized ATX systems are becoming less relevant every day. Increasing GPU horsepower diminishes the need for expensive multi-GPU setups; onboard sound has become good enough for all but serious audiophiles, and inexpensive 8GB DIMMs mean that two DIMM slots is plenty. The ASUS Z87I-Deluxe LGA1150 mini-ITX motherboard is the latest in ASUS' new line of enthusiast mini-ITX motherboards. If you haven't considered a mini-ITX build, maybe it's time you should. But, you say, aren't mini-ITX systems only good for building small servers, NAS systems, and HTPCs? Not any more. ASUS likes to push the boundaries, and enthusiasts still want high end motherboards with overclocking potential, even if the motherboards in question are tiny. Last year's P8Z77-i Deluxe was their first foray into the field, and the new Z87I-Deluxe is the same philosophy, but built around the latest Haswell CPUs and Z87 chipset. The Z87I-Deluxe is a member of ASUS' mainstream motherboard line and shares the line's new black and gold coloring. It continues the innovative vertical power regulator design introduced with the P8Z77-I Deluxe, but several other design features have changed. Let's get started with a closer look at this new motherboard. Closer Look: ASUS Z87I-Deluxe The Z87I-Deluxe is a mini-ITX motherboard. This means that it's limited to 170mm by 170mm (6.7" square) in size. This is just wide enough for a standard I/O panel and one slot, and just long enough to squeeze in two DIMM slots. In other words, there's not a lot of space on a mini-ITX motherboard. Simply finding board real estate for all the connectors is a real problem. Compared to its full ATX sibling (in this case, the Z87-Deluxe Dual), the Z87I-Deluxe looks positively Lilliputian. The small box means fewer accessories: clockwise from the left, you get a manual, a driver and utilities disk, four latching SATA cables, a modified version of ASUS' Q Connector for the front panel header, an I/O shield, and the new integrated 802.11ac/BlueTooth 4.0 antenna. The limited space on a min-ITX motherboard forces some components to be placed on the back. I have used some mini-ITX motherboards where components around the CPU socket baseplate interfered with the installation of back plates for third party coolers. Fortunately this isn't the case here: the back of the board around the CPU area is clean and free of obstructions. The Z87 chipset supports 6 SATA 6G ports natively, and ASUS makes sure you've got them all. The front panel header is to the left of the lowest two ports; just to the left of the front panel header is a vertical row of four (tiny) POST status LEDs. The included antenna integrates both 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0, replacing the two "stick" antennas ASUS used on previous motherboards. The integrated design of this antenna makes it easier to position, especially in an HTPC setting. Let's take a closer look at the some of the hardware details of this board in the next section. ASUS Z87I-Deluxe Details Nothing distinguishes an enthusiast motherboard like a robust power supply and voltage regulator section...but there's just not physical room on a min-ITX board for the capacitors and chokes required. ASUS' innovative vertical riser section provides 12 phase DIGI+ power for the CPU and iGPU, and 2 phase power for the RAM. There isn't a typical heat sink as you'd expect on the power supply of an ATX board, but the back of this riser is a thick slab of aluminum that serves the same purpose. While ASUS provides a full complement of SATA ports, they do skimp on the USB 2.0 ports: only a single USB 2.0 header is present, just below the coin battery. The USB 3.0 header and socketed BIOS chip are just above the battery, while the audio header is to its left. The WiFi and Bluetooth radios, which were on a tiny plug-in card in the P8Z77I-Deluxe, are integrated directly into the I/O port connectors on this new design. Starting at the left, the I/O panel provides four USB 2.0 ports, and a dual-link DVI port is above the clear CMOS and BIOS Flashback buttons. Next are an optical audio port above HDMI and DisplayPort outputs (the Z87I-Deluxe can drive three displays simultaneously). Next come six USB 3.0 ports (one of which is used for the BIOS Flashback feature) and a gigabit Ethernet port. Last are the WiFi and Bluetooth antenna connectors, and an abbreviated analog audio panel. The Z87I-Deluxe motherboard provides four four-pin PWM fan headers, controllable by the Fan Xpert 2 utility. The CPU fan header is colored bright yellow to stand out. The MemOK! button resets memory timings to standard in case of memory overclocking failure. Take a good look at this image and note all the near-microscopic components filling virtually ever square millimeter of space on this motherboard. Below are the current Z87I-Deluxe on the left and last year's P8Z77I-Deluxe on the right. Functionally there are a few differences: compared to last year's board, we lose some USB 2.0 ports, eSATA, and the TPU custom chip, but gain SATA ports and fan headers. Arguably USB 3.0 is more useful than eSATA, but I still miss the eSATA ports. Fan Headers USB 2 headers SATA ports TPU? eSATA ports Rear Panel USB 3.0 P8Z77I 2 2 4 Yes 2 4 Z87I 4 1 6 No 0 6 While there is no POST code display, these tiny LEDs illuminate in sequence to chart the progress of the POST. Everything's OK if you make it to the green. The limited space on a Z87I-Deluxe motherboard means that it doesn't have as many custom and third party chips as a larger board. ASUS' signature EPU and TPU processors are missing, for example. We do have an Asmedia ASM1442K HDMI controller, a Nuvoton chip used for voltage and temperature monitoring and control, a Realtek ALC1150 10-channel sound chip (remember what I said earlier about how good onboard sound has gotten?) and an Asmedia ASM1042A USB 3.0 host controller. Not shown is the chip labeled "BIOS", which isn't the actual BIOS, but rather a custom processor that enables the USB BIOS Flashback feature. With this chip, you can flash the board's BIOS from a USB key even with no CPU or RAM installed. Which is seriously cool. Let's take a look at the BIOS in the next section ASUS Motherboard UEFI BIOS ASUS has always had the best-designed UEFI BIOSes, in my opinion. They've upped their game with the release of their Z87 lineup, and even tweaked the color scheme. The default BIOS page layout has been updated to show CPU, DRAM, and fan settings across the top. The middle area, with its system performance settings, and the lower area, with the attached disks the user can drag into preferred boot order, remain the same. But this isn't just a status screen: you can enable the memory's XMP profile (if there is one), change fan profiles, change the order of boot devices, and make broad changes to the system's power/performance ratio. Pressing F7 or clicking the Advanced Mode button at the top right of the main screen switches the BIOS to advanced mode. This is where most enthusiasts will prefer to spend their time. Advanced Mode opens up options like the AI Tweaker overclocking controls, and the Advanced section (yes, there's an Advanced section in Advanced mode) opens up detailed settings for everything from CPU, Memory, SATA ports, USB (as shown above) and more. The CPU Configuration section displays the specifications of the processor, as well as allowing you to enable or disabled a variety of CPU features. The SATA Configuration section now has a setting for Link Power Management (Aggressive LPM Support). You can save power by having unused SATA devices power down, but this adds a small wait when the devices are needed as they must be powered up and brought back online. You can also change the default device names to more descriptive names as shown above. The Advanced section is also where you control the various onboard devices like sound, WiFi, Bluetooth, and the extra Asmedia-hosted USB 3.0 ports. There's more BIOS goodness in the next section. Z87 UEFI BIOS Continued Overclockers will gravitate to the AI Tweaker section. It's here that you'll be able to adjust every CPU, memory, and power setting you've ever heard of, and frankly a lot of settings you haven't heard of! The main Tweaker page serves as a stepping-off point for the individual sections on the CPU, DRAM, and power adjustments. There are a few general settings at the bottom. The CPU section has the usual suspects, but bear in mind that what you see on this screen will vary depending on the CPU installed in the system. You won't be able to adjust the CPU Core Ratio, CPU Strap, or some other settings with non-"K" series CPUs. I was going to count how many settings you could change on the AI Tweaker DRAM Timing Control page, but I lost count after 20. OK, actually I counted twice and got 33 different DRAM settings, including interesting ones like Scrambler Setting. I'm told that setting this to "Optimized" will improve stability. Of course, if you're overclocking, you're going to need to work with the power settings too. ASUS was one of the first (if not the first) vendor to adopt fully digital power supplies on board with their Digi+ design, and experienced overclockers will be able to make good use of all the capabilities available. Another cool BIOS feature ASUS introduced on their Z87 line is the concept of a Favorites section. At almost any point in the BIOS, you can press F4 and add that specific setting to the My Favorites page. This makes accessing your frequently-used settings much easier. Here I've added CPU Core Ration, CPU Core Voltage, and CPU Q-Fan Control to my Favorites page for easy access. This last item is one of my favorite features: a list of all the settings you've changed, before you have to commit to saving them. Ingenious. I'll examine ASUS' new version of AI Suite in the next section. Z87I-Deluxe Bundled Software Like all ASUS motherboards of the past few years, the Z87I-Deluxe motherboard comes with a version of ASUS' AI Suite utility software. The features included in this utility will vary according to the motherboard it's bundled with: for example, TUF motherboards get Thermal Radar. Let's take a look at what this board gets. The main panel shows Digi+ Power Control, Turbo V Evo, Ai Charger+, EZUpdate, System Information, USB Charger+, EPU, Fan Xpert2, USB 3.0 Boost, Network iControl, USB BIOS Flashback, and WiFi Go! Man, that's a lot of functionality! Digi+ Power Control, EPU, TurboV Evo, and Fan Xpert2 are all "tuning" features, and they get their own separate interface. The CPU section of Digi+ Power Control is shown above. All of these features are accessible from the BIOS, but you can dynamically change their settings from withint AI Suite without having to reboot the system. This makes overclocking experiments super convenient. ASUS will call it Auto Tuning on some motherboards and TurboV Evo on others. But what it does is try to come up with a significant, yet stable and reliable, overclock for your system. Obviously it won't be able to do much without a "K"-series CPU, but here it took my Core i7-4770K to 4.3GHz when 1 or 2 cores are loaded, 4.2GHz when three cores are loaded, and 4.1GHz when all four cores are loaded. This involved one reboot and a few minutes' time. Next, I tuned the fans. Unlike the TUF series motherboards, which are loaded with temperature sensors and let you assign fan performance based on specific sensor readings, the only temperature the Z87I-Deluxe can sense is the CPU. However, Fan Xpert2 will run each connected fan-- you can have up to four, including the CPU fan-- through its full RPM range so that you can subsequently set all fans with broad modes, like "Silent" or "Performance". The EPU setting lets you control some power-saving aspects of the system. While most enthusiasts won't be interested in this, it can be important for configuring something like a server or HTPC system that will be on 24/7. No, it's not going to save a lot of power, but every little bit helps. There's even more to AI Suite, as we'll see in the next section. Bundled Software Continued With Network iControl, you can prioritize network usage by selected programs. You could, for example, set reduced priority for a BitTorrent client, and a high priority for a networked game, so that long downloads in the background wouldn't adversely affect game play. You can also configure a No Delay TCP setting that will automatically bundle multiple small requests into a single packet, saving the 40-byte-per-packet overhead each separate request would normally incur. In the previous section, I showed how Fan Xpert2 could automatically determine the rev range of any connected fan. The CPU fan is the only fan that can be controlled by temperature, and if you want to go beyond the coarse automatic settings like "Silent" or "Performance", you can drag the line in this temperature vs. fan speed graph to create exactly the fan profile you want. There are still other AI Suite features: There are two USB fast-charge features: USB Charger+ and AI Charger. USB Charger+ will provide fast charging on the USB BIOS Flashback port (the port is outlined in green on the I/O shield). AI Charger provides rapid charging on the ASMedia-supported USB 3.0 ports, and only works with Apple "i-devices" and BC 1.1 compliant devices. WiFi Engine can operate in either of two modes: a client mode, where it connects your system to an existing WiFi network, and AP (Access Point) mode, which it can share an Ethernet network connection over WiFi. USB 3.0 Boost uses two different protocols to speed up USB transfers: Turbo protocol will work with most USB 3.0 devices, while UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol) provides even better performance for devices that support it. The proper protocol will be selected automatically depending on the device that's plugged in. Wi-Fi GO! is the star of the show. It has so many features and capabilities that it really deserves its own, separate review! Take a look at all the features in the WiFi GO!: There's Cloud GO!, an elaborate mechanism to synchronize files on your computer and mobile devices using ASUS' own services, or third party services like Dropbox or Google Drive. Remote Desktop replicates your PC's desktop on the screen of a mobile device. If you have any Digital Living Network Alliance devices, you can stream content from your PC. Smart Sensor Control uses the gyroscope and other sensors in mobile devices to control the mouse pointer (not terribly useful, in my opinion, but fun to play with), while Remote Keyboard & Mouse does pretty much what it says. Capture & Send sends screen shots from your PC to your mobile device, and the File Transfer functions makes moving files between a mobile device and a PC easy. All you need is the appropriate program on your Android or iOS mobile device, which you can easily get by scanning the QR codes shown on the WiFi GO! screeen. Above is an image of the WiFi GO! Remote program running on an iPhone. Large icons denote the functions available. Transferring photos from my iPhone camera to the PC was trivial: just select the photos you want and click Send. Remote Desktop worked fine, although seeing a 2560x1600 screen on my 4" iPhone display wasn't actually very useful. I had one problem with AI Suite. At the bottom of the main AI Suite display is a summary bar showing CPU clock speed, voltage, memory settings, and so forth. The CPU voltage shown consistently reads a little over 0.5 volts high. In this image I have the CPU voltage set at 1.3v in the BIOS, and AIDIA 64's CPUID utility shows this. However, AI Suite incorrectly shows the voltage as a processor-killing 1.84V, highlighting it in red to make sure you notice. Well, it's time to start testing... Motherboard Testing Methodology After a few years of testing motherboards, I’ve noticed that motherboards based on the same chipset tend to have very similar performance. This wasn’t always the case, but now that the memory controller’s in the processor, and the PCI-E lanes are in the chipset, it’s not surprising that everyone’s “Y22″ chipset motherboard performs pretty much alike…at stock settings, anyway. Haswell collapses the field even further by moving voltage regulation circuitry onto the CPU. Say goodbye to those exotic 24-phase CPU power supplies of yore… So testing motherboards, unlike testing CPUs or video cards, is more about examining the proprietary features that make one different from another, as well as testing a board’s overclocking ability, especially if it’s marketed to the enthusiast community. I tested the ASUS Z87I-Deluxe board with a Core i7-4770K CPU at both stock and overclocked speeds. For the stock clocks, I used the memory's XMP profile. For the overclock, I used the Auto Tuning feature in AI Suite as well as the highest overclock I was able to hit manually. When I overclock, I like to find the best performance I can get with all the cores synchronized-- that is, all cores running the same multiplier. I know from previous experience with five other Z87 motherboards and this particular CPU that a multiplier of 45x, CPU strap of 100MHz, and core voltage of 1.3v is as high as I can reliably go with air cooling. Test System Motherboard: ASUS Z87I-Deluxe with BIOS 0403 Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K “Haswell” CPU System Memory: 8G (2x4G) DDR3-1600 at 9-9-9-24 timings Video Card: AMD Radeon HD6850 CPU Cooler: Thermalright Silver Arrow Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium x64 Benchmark Applications AIDA64 v3.00.2500 SPECViewPerf 11 x264HD 5.0 As comparison I used MSI's Z87 MPOWER motherboard as well as ASUS' own Z87-Deluxe Dual motherboard, both of which are full ATX boards. I’ll start with synthetic benchmarks in the next section. AIDA64 Benchmark Results AIDA64 is a full 64-bit benchmark and test suite utilizing MMX, 3DNow! and SSE instruction set extensions, and will scale up to 32 processor cores. An enhanced 64-bit System Stability Test module is also available to stress the whole system to its limits. For legacy processors all benchmarks and the System Stability Test are available in 32-bit versions as well. Additionally, AIDA64 adds new hardware to its database, including 300 solid-state drives. On top of the usual ATA auto-detect information the new SSD database enables AIDA64 to display flash memory type, controller model, physical dimensions, and data transfer performance data. AIDA64 v1.00 also implements SSD-specific SMART disk health information for Indilinx, Intel, JMicron, Samsung, and SandForce controllers. All of the benchmarks used in this test- Queen, PhotoWorxx, ZLib, and hash- rely on basic x86 instructions, and consume very little system memory while also being aware of Hyper-Threading, multi-processors, and multi-core processors. Of all the tests in this review, AIDA64 is the one that best isolates the processor’s performance from the rest of the system. While this is useful in that it more directly compares processor performance, readers should remember that virtually no “real world” programs will mirror these results. In the Queen test, the ASUS Z87I-Deluxe starts out with a small 5% performance disadvantage as compared to its big brother Z87-Deluxe Dual. We'll see this repeated through most of the tests. The PhotoWorxx test is much more dependent on memory bandwidth than CPU horsepower, and there's virtually no difference between the stock and overclocked scores since the memory is running at the same speed in all cases. The ZLIB and AES tests continue the trend: the Z87I-Deluxe figures come in slightly below those of the Z87-Deluxe Dual. Let's take a look at SPECViewPerf in the next section. SPECViewPerf 11 Test Results The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation is “…a non-profit corporation formed to establish, maintain and endorse a standardized set of relevant benchmarks that can be applied to the newest generation of high-performance computers.” Their free SPECviewperf benchmark incorporates code and tests contributed by several other companies and is designed to stress computers in a reproducible way. SPECviewperf 11 was released in June 2010 and incorporates an expanded range of capabilities and tests. Note that results from previous versions of SPECviewperf cannot be compared with results from the latest version, as even benchmarks with the same name have been updated with new code and models. SPECviewperf comprises test code from several vendors of professional graphics modeling, rendering, and visualization software. Most of the tests emphasize the CPU over the graphics card, and have between 5 and 13 sub-sections. For this review I ran the Lightwave, Maya, and Seimens Teamcenter Visualization tests. Results are reported as abstract scores, with higher being better. Lightwave The lightwave-01 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workloads generated by the SPECapc for Lightwave 9.6 benchmark. The models for this viewset range in size from 2.5 to 6 million vertices, with heavy use of vertex buffer objects (VBOs) mixed with immediate mode. GLSL shaders are used throughout the tests. Applications represented by the viewset include 3D character animation, architectural review, and industrial design. Maya The maya-03 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by the SPECapc for Maya 2009 benchmark. The models used in the tests range in size from 6 to 66 million vertices, and are tested with and without vertex and fragment shaders. State changes such as those executed by the application- including matrix, material, light and line-stipple changes- are included throughout the rendering of the models. All state changes are derived from a trace of the running application. Siemens Teamcenter Visualization Mockup The tcvis-02 viewset is based on traces of the Siemens Teamcenter Visualization Mockup application (also known as VisMockup) used for visual simulation. Models range from 10 to 22 million vertices and incorporate vertex arrays and fixed-function lighting. State changes such as those executed by the application- including matrix, material, light and line-stipple changes- are included throughout the rendering of the model. All state changes are derived from a trace of the running application. SPECviewperf tests actually comprise code from real-world applications, so their results are more indicative of total system performance than the pure CPU performance metrics we see from synthetic tests like AIDA64. Surprisingly, in the Lightwave test, the mini-ITX motherboard scores almost 7% slower than the ATX-sized ASUS board, and 11% lower than the MSI board at stock clocks, not recovering until we get to the overclocked scores. The results are similar, if scaled, in the other two tests. x264HD 5.0 Test Tech ARP’s x264 HD Benchmark comprises the Avisynth video scripting engine, an x264 encoder, a sample 1080P video file, and a script file that actually runs the benchmark. The script invokes four two-pass encoding runs and reports the average frames per second encoded as a result. The script file is a simple batch file, so you could edit the encoding parameters if you were interested, although your results wouldn’t then be comparable to others. This is another example of a useful benchmark that’s based on real-world code. I like encoding benchmarks since they’re one of the few tests that can measure a real-world use of the power of modern multi-core processors. I like this particular benchmark since it’s the best “overclock killer” I’ve seen: systems that will run most stress tests all day long with a given set of overclock settings will crash on this benchmark. And it's the same story here. At stock clocks, the mini-ITX motherboard scores 7% lower than its ATX sibling in Pass 1, and about 6% lower in Pass 2. I describe my overclocking experience with this board in the next section. ASUS Motherboard Overclocking There are several ways to overclock the ASUS Z87I-Deluxe: you can manually overclock in the BIOS or via AI Suite, or you can invoke "Auto" OC Tuner in the BIOS, or "Auto Tuning" in AI Suite. The automatic overclocking mechanisms in the BIOS and AI Suite both produced the same result: a multiplier of 43x when one or two cores are loaded, dropping to 42x when three cores are loaded, and 41x when all cores are loaded. My manual overclock is 45x (at 1.3 volts) with all cores synchronized. This pushes the hairy limits of what this particular Haswell-based Core i7-4770K CPU can do with the best air cooling available. Under load, CPU core temperatures hovered in the high 90s when an ambient temperature of 25 degrees Celsius. ASUS' auto overclocking mechanisms have been getting better and better; it's not clear to me if the values used are just applied from a lookup table somewhere, or if they're arrived at via stress-testing (sometimes the stress testing is obvious; when I tested the Z87-Deluxe Dual, the AI Suite "4-Way Optimization" specifically noted on-screen that it was testing, but I didn't see anything similar invoking TurboV Evo on this motherboard). Still, my manual overclocking scores averaged about 8% higher than the auto OC scores. One note here: the power supply riser board gets really hot when running benchmarks at overclocked speeds. The size and location of the board preclude the use of normal heat sinks, although the back of the board is a thick slab of aluminum. If you plan to overclock this board, I'd strongly recommend you ensure that there's some good airflow in this area. Mini-ITX Motherboard Final Thoughts With motherboard performance being so similar if the motherboards are using the same chipset, vendors must distinguish themselves on features. But the tony 6.7" square of space allotted for a mini-ITX motherboard doesn't leave much room for things like extra SATA ports or custom ASICs like the TPU and EPU chips we see on other ASUS motherboards. One way to look at this is that the size of the motherboard is a feature. This is what enables you to build a tiny HTPC or a desktop system that's not a giant tower. Strapped onto my Lian Li test bench, outfitted with the Silver Arrow air cooler and a Radeon 6850 video card, the ASUS Z87I-Deluxe is virtually invisible beneath its supporting hardware. Of course, one could use the integrated video and stock Intel cooler, or all-in-one water cooler, and have a much more compact and visible system. In addition to giving up the features you'd have on a full-sized ATX board, my tests show you're leaving some performance on the table as well. However, although the performance differential is clear in benchmark charts, you'll never notice it in day to day use. As I mentioned earlier in the review, ASUS made some different design and feature decisions on this board compared to the Z77-based P8Z77-I Deluxe from 2012. They've eliminated the e-SATA port and one USB 2.0 header, but added two more SATA 6G ports. They've also provided two more fan headers and rear panel USB 3.0 ports, which is good. That said, were I building a system around this motherboard, I'd at least add a $19.99 NZXT IU101 internal USB hub (Newegg) to get those ports back. And remember, that power supply riser board can get really toasty when overclocking. ASUS Z87I-Deluxe Conclusion It's been a while since I built a full-sized ATX machine. Even my gaming PC, equipped with twin GTX770 video cards, is built on a micro-ATX motherboard. Smaller machines just seem to make more sense these days unless you need the space for a bespoke water cooling right or triple graphics cards. As I mentioned above, with mini-ITX space constraints, deciding what features to include on the motherboard is doubtless something that ASUS spent some time on. There simply isn't room on a mini-ITX board to have all the USB and SATA ports a Haswell system can support natively, so there's always going to be something missing that someone wants. Since the universe of mini-ITX boards for enthusiasts is so small, it would behoove you to carefully determine what your needs are before buying this motherboard. ASUS uses the same black-and-gold color scheme here they use on their other "mainstream" motherboards. However, there are few windowed mini-ITX cases, and as you can see above a large air cooler and graphics card hide most of the board, so its appearance is really not important. If this board lacks hardware features, it's made up for to some extent by the broad range of capabilities provided in AI Suite, especially the wifi features, which can do everything from turning your computer into the router for a private wireless network to letting you control the system from an Android phone anywhere in your house. While some of the capabilities seem a bit silly (would I ever really want to do a screen grab from my PC to my phone?), most are wonderfully useful. The performance of this board is a consistent 5-6% less than that of the ATX-size ASUS Z87 boards I've tested. I don't know why this might be, but it's quite repeatable. That said, you'll never notice this deficit in daily use. As with all ASUS motherboards, the construction quality is excellent. The ASUS Z87I-Deluxe LGA1150 mini-ITX motherboard sells online for $189.99 at Newegg / Amazon. This is definitely towards the high end of mini-ITX motherboards, but if you're looking to build that portable gaming rig, this board should be on your short list. Pros: + Excellent auto-overclocking. + More SATA ports and fan headers than most mini-ITX rigs will need + Excellent fan control + POST status LEDs + Flash your munged BIOS without a CPU or RAM Cons: - Minor performance deficit relative to ASUS' ATX boards - Only one onboard USB 2.0 header - Power riser gets really hot Ratings: Performance: 8.75 Appearance: 9.00 Construction: 9.50 Functionality: 9.00 Value: 9.25 Final Score: 9.10 out of 10. Excellence Achievement: Benchmark Reviews Golden Tachometer Award. COMMENT QUESTION: Which desktop motherboard form-factor will become the most popular?