(Skylake) Battle of the best Bang for Buck Mini-ITX Motherboards!

Guildwars2fan

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Jan 19, 2012
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Yeah, in my research that seems to be the case, however, checkout these detrimiental reviews...

"So many issues, I've spent weeks troubleshooting this thing:
-ram slot is defective, keep getting memory_management_error blue screen, but I did memtest86 on both my rams and they works perfectly fine.
-PC restarts randomly (with no overclock on both cpu and gpu), this happens on many occasion when I was gaming. I thought it was the power supply but it wasn't, I have a EVGA GS 650W, which is way more than what my system needs, and I test it too with a power supply tester and it works fine."

"Cons: Unfortunately the cons were deal-breakers. I returned this board for a refund after only a single day. The two critical issues I had were as follows:

1) The board would not even boot when any XMP profile was used. I used memory sticks running at speeds both certified by Asus as being compatible with this board. Despite this, enabling the xmp profile would not work AT ALL. I also tried manually setting and configuring all bios options to reflect correct memory settings and there was still nothing. Granted, boards with early bios revisions sometimes have issues with memory, so this issue alone might not have prompted the instant return. However, most boards will at least POST and boot when XMP is enabled, usually you get more than a permanently dark screen. See issue #2.

2) This board made curiously loud coil whine or buzzing sounds whenever the cpu gets stressed. Any benchmark or stress tester produced load and troubling sounding pulsating squealing noises that caused grave concern. I did some research online and toggled a few bios settings but the buzzing/whine noises that coincided with cpu load persisted. Playing games also caused the board to produce horrible sounding coil/capacitor whine of some form or another. I am not an engineer so I do not know which exact components it was coming from, but I disconnected hardware from my case and isolated the sound to definitely be coming from the motherboard from the top left quadrant of the board.

Other Thoughts: I am not biased against Asus, I have used several of their boards in builds over the years and have had no complaints until now. I had high expectations for this board and I feel that Asus failed me. This motherboard was for my personal machine, which was out of order until I waited for a different board to arrive."

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813132641

I understand sometimes people get bad boards, but Gigabyte has sold so many with good reviews, which is why I'm torn and asking here :p