Four Z77-Based Mini-ITX Motherboards, Reviewed
Yes, you can get all of the functionality enabled by Intel's Z77 Express chipset in a tiny mini-ITX form factor! We round up four motherboards that uniquely approach the gaming and media center markets with a range of features and prices. Which is best?
P8Z77-I Deluxe Firmware
The P8Z77-I Deluxe supports several automatic and manual overclocking methods, but those with XMP-capable memory will likely want to begin their efforts by setting XMP overclocking mode.
Asus MultiCore Enhancement takes away some of the granularity of Intel Turbo Boost, enabling the highest boost ratio with all cores at full load (within some thermal and power limits). We disabled it and set a fixed 45x multiplier for our overclock stability tests, though some builders will instead tune for lower idle power consumption.
XMP was nothing more than a baseline for our stability tests. The P8Z77-I Deluxe easily pushed our RAM to DDR3-2800 at the same timings, even after we dropped to a 1.63 V DIMM setting to compensate for the board’s over-voltage tendencies.
The P8Z77-I Deluxe supports primary, secondary, and tertiary memory timing manipulation, plus waveform controls.
Our combination of settings required a hop over to the CPU Power Management submenu for single-multiplier manipulation. Power limits are also found here, though Asus told us that we didn’t need to adjust them.
Core voltage settings were almost spot-on at idle, but we needed to increase Load-Line Calibration to Ultra High to keep it above 1.24 V under load. The next step up, its Extreme setting pushed core voltage beyond our desired limit, to 1.27 V.
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