Zotac have decided to extend the heatsink over the IO panel due to their back panel port arrangement. Even with the fan headers, this should help with cooling if the system were to be pushed with a high wattage chip and an overclock.
The location of the 8-pin CPU power connector is a little odd — we find it on the bottom of the board below the heatsink for the power delivery. This means that any power supply would need to reach over parts of the board in order to connect in.
Zotac get around this by including an 8-pin CPU power extension cable in the box, but that still leaves the fact that a cable is somewhere potentially blocking airflow.
The WiFi card is perpendicular to the board itself, and runs two small cables to antenna ports on the back panel — I personally found these cables a little annoying when trying to plug peripherals in to the ports when the board was fixed in a case. Also on board are various headers for the front panel, the front panel audio, two USB 2.
The location of the USB 3. It is nice to see a debug LED on board however — I did have to use it a couple of times to determine why the board was failing to boot. On the back panel, the IO is slightly odd compared to other Z77 motherboards we have encountered.
First up is a block of four USB 2. On the pure hardware side, apart from the arrangement of the socket area, we could call Zotac out on one or two design issues.
The lack of an analogue output, even in the modern era, could be an oversight — this all comes down to the design of the package. Zotac If you ever wanted small form factor, then Zotac has always been an option, sprouting mITX products for every platform and chipset. Visual Inspection As one of the first Z77 ITX motherboard on the test bed, it is hard not to notice the arrangement of the motherboard as a whole.
Before you begin Driver updates for Windows 10, along with many devices, such as network adapters, monitors, printers, and video cards, are automatically downloaded and installed through Windows Update. You probably already have the most recent drivers, but if you'd like to manually update or reinstall a driver, here's how: Update the device driver In the search box on the taskbar, enter device manager, then select Device Manager. Select Search automatically for updated driver software.
Select Update Driver. Right-click or press and hold the name of the device, and select Uninstall. Restart your PC. Windows will attempt to reinstall the driver. We see similarly close scores throughout our peripheral testing, and for good reason. However, there are a couple of exceptions worth noting. The Zotac board also matches the USB read speeds of its peers.
Asus offers special USB Boost software that can accelerate performance with certain hardware combinations, including when a USAP-compatible device is plugged into ports associated with the ASMedia controller. The fast boot option is configurable, and users also have the option of setting a time delay for the initial POST screen. Some differences can arise when boards start loading up on third-party peripheral chips and fancy power circuitry, though.
However, the Zotac-powered system only consumes less power when idling and playing p YouTube video. When taxed with our full system load, which comprises rendering a scene in Cinebench GPU voltage: 1. No surprises here. The mSATA slot and display output config are the two most notable deviations from the standard formula.
We used the following system configurations for testing. We should also thank the motherboard makers for providing their products for review. The Corsair drive was also wiped before we loaded our system image. The tests and methods we employ are usually publicly available and reproducible.
All tests were run at least three times, and we reported the median of those results. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them. We tested the latest SunSpider release, version 0. This benchmark tests one of the most popular H. The results come in two parts, one for each of the two passes the encoder makes through the video file. We busted out our Inside the second methods to testing gaming performance.
Here, we measured the boot time after a full system shutdown. We used a stopwatch to time each test and stopped the clock when the Windows 8 Start screen finished loading.
Otherwise, its application performance closely matches that of the competition. Not even our frame time-focused 99th percentile gaming metric can tease out a meaningful difference between the three boards.
The movie file set contains eight similarly sized files totaling 5. The stronger USB 3. Zotac relies on a pair of Realtek chips to feed dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. These controllers are just as fast as the Broadcom and Intel silicon used by the Asus and ASRock boards, respectively.
Higher values are better. Our first set of results was gathered with the systems idling apart from the RMAA app, of course. All the boards score much better at idle than they do in our load test. Zotac added a dedicated mSATA slot to the new model, giving the board an edge over most of its rivals. Support for mini SSDs is a nice touch, and it definitely adds more value than the unique display output config and dual Gigabit Ethernet connectors.
Enthusiasts and newbies alike can benefit from the POST code display, as well. Unfortunately, the firmware is horribly behind the times. The interface may look different—or at least more colorful—but it feels dated and lacks features that have been present in competing boards for years. And mice. We still managed to overclock the pants off our Core iK, though. The 4. If only there were a discount attached to the basic firmware. However, Zotac needs to up its game if it wants to compete with the big dogs now treading on its turf.
My problem with Zotac is their poor medium-term reliability. My main system used to use 2 ethernet ports. Could easily have done it on a mITX system as long as there was 2 ethernet ports. If i used wifi for 1 of those jobs it would have slowed down the networking.
Mini-itx in general is more work then a ATX board. Is it possible to show a shot of the motherboard with everything plugged in?
It had crazy uptime and worked fine, the NIC never gave me a problem.
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