Three Sub-$100 LGA1150 Mini-ITX Motherboards

ASRock H81M-ITX

In the box, you get the H81M-ITX, manual, driver CD, two SATA cables and the I/O plate. Considering the board's features, that is a complete bundle since there are only two SATA ports.

There is nothing anomalous about the layout, and nothing appears to be blocked, although there is no header for a case speaker, nor is there a piezo on the board. All capacitors are solid, and chokes are the more efficient ferrite core rather than iron. For the simple systems for which this board is intended, that probably isn’t a big deal. The 24-pin power connector is on the front edge, as it is with most boards. The single USB2.0 header had to be placed behind the front panel connector. The battery, a common CR2032, is flat and easily accessible, not on edge as it is on some small boards. The CLR_CMOS jumper is not near the battery though, it is on the front edge to the right of the power connector, where it should be easily accessible. The CPU fan header is adjacent to the single chassis fan header (which is PWM, not 3-pin), and the front panel audio header is in its usual place behind the rear audio connectors. The RAM slots have locking levers on both ends, so you can be sure your RAM is fully seated. This board won’t make you guess about anything.

Here is the Main UEFI screen, showing version information:

If you want to overclock the Pentium, that's basically a one-click affair on the OC Tweaker page.

As expected, it gives us this result:

I was struck by just how sparse this board is in terms of features and ports. I can't imagine the average Tom's Hardware reader having much interest in it. Yes, it can overclock the G3258 quite easily, but how much does that matter? Two SATA ports is a deal-breaker if one of your backup strategies is imaging your system drive onto another disk, or even running a RAID 1 pair. After all, this board can't do RAID, and you cannot add a second drive unless you forgo an optical drive. Some power users are happy to do just that, but many aren't.

As I contemplated this article from my desk at work, however, I realized that the H81M-ITX would be a wonderful fit for a networked office PC. Its LAN port provides access to all of the storage you need. And you aren't connected to a network, remember how the IT guy used to come around with an external drive and back up the office workstations? This board's eSATA port makes that archaic practice feasible, if needed.

The H81M-ITX is cheap and competent enough for that market. Then again, few companies "roll their own" anymore. It's hard to compete with Dell, HP and Lenovo, which sell their cut-down small business boxes that include operating systems. For that reason, while there's nothing explicitly wrong with ASRock's H81M-ITX, it doesn't deserve an award either. If you plan to run Linux on this board, the competition's price advantage pretty much goes away.