ASRock X99E-ITX/ac Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 09.06.15Page:
Conclusion
| Allgemein | + | - | |
| The the X99E-ITX/AC ASRock is conquering new land. No other motherboard vendor has an X99 based miniITX model in its portfolio. Overall ASRock did a good job, although there is simply not enough space to implement all features the massive X99 chipset offers. Therefore ASRock had to toss two DIMM slots and apart from that they're using an Narrow-ILM-type socket, which make the board only compatible to very few coolers. Nevertheless this little board leave an overall good impression. When it comes to performance you real world applications are not taking a significant hit from the smaller memory interface. Apparently it's only the theoretical memory bandwidth benchmarks, which show 50% lower performance. This in the end has quite an impact on our overall rating (average of all results), but as we mentioned, there is no noticable difference in realworld applications, since the memory interface acts as a bottleneck, which in this case is not at its limit. The storage flexibility you get with this tiny X99 motherboard is really good. This means there are enough SATA ports, there is a SATA Express header and there is also an Ultra-M.2 Slot. Also the I/O panel has been equipped with good mix of connectors. We like the fact, that there are eight USB connectors, including two USB3.1 headers. |
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Design - Layout |
- Narrow-ILM-Type Socket |
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| Layout | + | - | |
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The ASRock X99E-ITX/AC's layout has been very well thought. Once more practical are the angled SATA connectors, but unfortunately there are no power- and reset-buttons. There is also no debug display which would have been very useful in case you should have issues with a component in your system or the board itself. Apart from that we like the fact, that there is an M.2 x4 slot, which allows for the installation of high-performance M.2 SSDs. |
- Angled SATA connectors
- CLR CMOS Button (I/O panel) - M.2 x4 |
- Space around the CPU
socket
- No debug LED, no power/reset button |
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| Performance | + | - | |
| Having a closer look at overall 2D as well as 3D performance shows that this board ranks last in both cases. The reason for that can be found in the memory bandwidth benchmarks, which are really pulling the average rating down, although not having a very small impact on real world performance. On another note we had a look at power consumption and it turns out that this board is quite a bit more power efficient than other models. | - Power consumption | - 3DMark Ice Storrm | |
| Overclocking / BIOS | + | - | |
| The BIOS of the X99E-ITX/AC is identical from what you get with other recent ASRock motherboards these days the only difference is the backgound color. This means the basic structure and also the design has not been changed. Overall the structure is easy to understand and even if you're not a very experienced user you will find the things you'd like to change. On another note ASRock is dedicated and pushing hard did a pretty good job with this on but still, every here and there the performance could be improved. | - Clear arrangement - Sheer amount of options | ||
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| The ASRock X99E-ITX/AC is listed at geizhals for a price of 308 Euro. This makes it rather expensive if you consider that there are apparently not too many features. The price certainly reflects research and development costs, since it takes quite an effort to build such a compact high-end boar. If you want to build an X99 based ITX system then there is no way around this board, since (until today) there is no other miniITX X99 motherboard available. | - High-Performance-MiniITX | ||
| Rating | |||
| The ASRock X99E-ITX/AC recieves good 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
| Navigate through the articles | |
ASUS X99-A USB 3.1 Review |
Gigabyte X99M-Gaming 5 Preview
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