Zotac has sent me a fun one folks, it’s a tiny little mITX motherboard with lofty ambitions! The mITX platform is a truly small one, the motherboards are 6″ x 6″ square, that’s it!
Historically they’ve been aimed at very low energy usage HTPC type setups, and hence have had slow and efficient CPUs in them. That works fine for a HTPC or a web browsing type box, but if you want to run some games or do some video transcoding on your HTPC you can forget about it.
Zotac has been one of the prime movers in the mITX HTPC market for a while now, they’ve put out quite a few excellent motherboards and clearly know what they’re doing when it comes to making tiny motherboards.
Zotac is changing that. This motherboard I have in front of me accepts all LGA1155 SandyBridge CPUs, from the low power efficient Pentium chips all the way up to the monster of a CPU called an i7 2600k. The 2600k is designed for overclocking, and it just so happens that I intend to do exactly that!
What? Overclock a high power CPU on an ITX motherboard? Am I insane?!
Well…. yes, but lets ignore that part.
The real answer is, YES! You see, Zotac decided to kick things up a notch and packed this tiny little motherboard full of voltage regulators and heatsinks, slap a full 16x PCIe 2.0 slot in it, and build it for overclocking! It even says “Super Overclock” on the board itself!
I’ll be pushing the Z68-ITX WiFi to the limit overclocking and running some benchmarks, along with the more sedate review items such as video transcoding and playback, and other such normal use things.
First though, lets look at the board.
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