Great gaming lite/HTPC board
Pros: Looks great, Ivy Bridge and PCI-E 3.0 support, lots of features
Cons: No overclocking on H77 chipset
The ITX motherboard has come a long way this generation, since getting smaller seems to be a decent focus right now.
This board is great for HTPC duty or a lightweight LAN rig if you don't need to overclock. It doesn't have all the features on its bigger brother, the Z77 ITX, but it does cost 2/3 the price. It looks great with the all-black color scheme, which may be important to some people.
One of the biggest highlights of this board is the boot times. I have literally never used a faster booting board, and it beats some of the other ones I have used cold booting vs sleep resume. It takes only 17 seconds from pressing the button to being at the desktop ready to go - with a break in the middle to type my password - with just about any decent SSD.
Power consumption is also very good, pairing my board with an Intel Xeon E3-1220 (80w) and a GTX 460, my idle/non-gaming power use is only 43w at the wall, most of which I can assume is the GPU.
Gaming wise, it works great even if it can't overclock. It matches my previous 3930k rig with the same GPU at the same settings so I have no problems there.
Some other nice features, it does have 2x PWM fan headers, and USB 3.0 header on board. The onboard audio works great, based on the Realtek ALC892 chip.
All in all, a great board for $99 and I would not hesitate to buy it again for the same use. The UEFI BIOS is easy to use and well laid out, performance is stellar.
This board is great for HTPC duty or a lightweight LAN rig if you don't need to overclock. It doesn't have all the features on its bigger brother, the Z77 ITX, but it does cost 2/3 the price. It looks great with the all-black color scheme, which may be important to some people.
One of the biggest highlights of this board is the boot times. I have literally never used a faster booting board, and it beats some of the other ones I have used cold booting vs sleep resume. It takes only 17 seconds from pressing the button to being at the desktop ready to go - with a break in the middle to type my password - with just about any decent SSD.
Power consumption is also very good, pairing my board with an Intel Xeon E3-1220 (80w) and a GTX 460, my idle/non-gaming power use is only 43w at the wall, most of which I can assume is the GPU.
Gaming wise, it works great even if it can't overclock. It matches my previous 3930k rig with the same GPU at the same settings so I have no problems there.
Some other nice features, it does have 2x PWM fan headers, and USB 3.0 header on board. The onboard audio works great, based on the Realtek ALC892 chip.
All in all, a great board for $99 and I would not hesitate to buy it again for the same use. The UEFI BIOS is easy to use and well laid out, performance is stellar.
