Testing, Overclocking
The first step in any real testing or overclocking is to check the BIOS out. In this case it is a graphical UEFI, though it is still laid out along the classic BIOS lines. All the major options are there as you can see in the following gallery.
There aren’t a lot of overclocking options and some of them are a bit odd, but that didn’t stop me from trying. The main thing I discovered is that my idea of what 25mV is and the board’s idea of 25mV are very different. I figured that telling it to add 25mV during turbo boost would result in something like 25mV being added. I was wrong. Telling it to add 25mV raises the vcore in turbo mode by around 90mV! Telling it to add 100mV adds almost 300mV. This is a rather serious issue, but something that can be worked around. Just make sure you check the vcore in CPUz after (and during) overclocking, and work the voltage up slowly.
The other oddness is that the option labeled as an overall core multiplier can only be lowered, it cannot be raised. On the plus side the turbo multipliers can be raised, and all cores can be set that way. It’s a bit more awkward but it works well enough.
The other awkward part is mounting a cooler. All of my coolers either require a large flat area around the mounting holes on the rear of the motherboard (which the Z77-ITX lacks) or are entirely too wide to fit. Thus I am stuck on the stock Intel cooler.
The first thing I did was enable XMP to bump my ram up to its rated 2133-7-10-7 settings, and prompted had the motherboard fail to POST and show a recovery screen. This is good news and bad news. The good is that it can recover from a failed memory OC, the bad news is that it does not set the ram voltage contained in the XMP profile. Manually setting the ram voltage and enabling XMP worked great. A very brief amount of tinkering with the vcore and multipliers resulted in the following OC:
Not only is this stable as far as prime95 is concerned, it also does not overheat. I have to say I’m fairly impressed. To get the ram running at its rated speed I enabled the XMP profile (which was correctly detected) and manually set the ram voltage to the 1.65v specified by the XMP profile. Like many (most?) boards it does not apply the voltages that are part of the XMP profile. With that done the ram worked beautifully at high speed.
It can do 4.3GHz easily enough with a bit more vcore, but overheats on the stock cooler at that speed/voltage. I suspect that the Water 2.0 series would mount up decently and work well, but I no longer have those samples here. In any case, a 4.2GHz 3570k in an ITX package is staggeringly powerful for the space it consumes!
I spent a little bit of time with the bclk and couldn’t get over 101.5MHz with it, this is somewhat disappointing. If you have an unlocked CPU it doesn’t matter unless you’re trying to do some serious benching.
I’m not doing benchmarks at this point because realistically, this board performs to within a fraction of a percent of every other Z77 board with a CPU at this speed out there. Unless you’re buying a motherboard for extreme overclocking the fraction of a percent differences between boards are not worth worry about. If you’re buying a buy for extreme overclocking, an ITX board is not the way to go! Not on this platform, anyway.
What I did do is test all the features I could.
The conclusion? They work! My old windows 7 disk doesn’t have many of the drivers, so the driver disk is quite important.
The WiFi networking connects quickly and works great, no dropouts at all. The Ethernet bits work just like you’d expect them to, the BlueTooth accepts a driver, but I don’t know if it works as I do not have any bluetooth devices. The onboard graphics (on chip, really) work great and output to the HDMI ports correctly.
All told I’m quite impressed by the functionality Zotac really did cram a desktop board into an ITX form factor. HTPCs built around this board are going to be wildly overpowered, it’s really aimed more at super portable gaming type builds I think. Not that you can’t use it for a HTPC of course! It certainly does not have any issues streaming anything or decoding/encoding anything else.
I spent a week or so using it as my daily PC’s board (a bit of a change from the ASRock Z77 Professional size wise!) and I couldn’t tell the difference at all. That’s awfully impressive for something this small.
I recieved a Crucial M4 256GB mSATA SSD for review (coming soon!) while I was working with the Z77-ITX. I was able to test to see if the WiFi module and the mSATA SSD could co-exist. They do! The mSATA is only SATA2 3Gbps however, so the M4 cannot fully stretch its SATA3 6Gbps legs. Still, 270MB/s is mighty quick.
