I have my 860 on a MI P55 at 150bclock with HT on. While gaming core temps usually get up to the mid-60s. So far so good! Thats about as far as I can push it safely.
Not sure if you read the review in depth, but the 4GHz benches were for fixed frequency compare purposes only. I used a 120MM fan to blow air across the board just for the sake of running the game benches where the CPU loads are very light (only around 50 Celsius). If you're running the board in a case or stress testing (OCCT, Linpack etc), keep it at stock with HT enabled CPU's and at a max of say 3.6GHz with a 750 in a case.
Any version on what Creative chip DFI is actually using?
I'm guessing it's the cheapie they use on their gimped X-Fi XtremeAudio cards, since I haven't seen a real X-Fi chip on any board, but I was just curious.
the X-FI features are purely software/drivers from Creative, supported by the Realtek ALC885. So no Creative hardware I'm afraid (I did mention software support in the feature table on page 3).
Why can't you reviewers, hold these manufactures feet to the flames.
Any one in the review business actually have a backbone?
I for one, am tired of what appear to be half hearted efforts on the part of Mobo manufactures to provide products that WORK.
Bios settings not working? Harddrives disappearing? Endless loops? Usb issues, with ding ding din, USB devices? WTF?
I've bought 'cheap' boards, i've bought higher end boards, i've bought everything in the middle, I've got boards with awesome reviews, boards with few reviews.
But just about each one has issues, needs various firmware updates, etc etc, just to hit a stable medium, and have all its features work. (well almost all).
And yet, no one, no one, in the review business seems to care. The slap (loosey using the word, since yes all the tests are alot of, at the end of the day, boring work) a few tests, or a battery they run. Post some benchmarkers, and basically call it a day. Not only that, but the bigger the reviewer, the more likely they have, and get access to actual support teams/ engineers, that get them around issues.
A regular cosumter? phhff, go on some forum and hope others have found the solution, because the CS you'll get is likely some idiot csr reading of a script, who's only goal in life is to churn support calls/emails to get a bonus, actually fixing a problem? HA.
BTW, problems which should have been caught by the manufacture INITIALY.
How hard is it to see if your bios settings actually do something? How hard is it to check how much power your board can supply without killing it self?
Which leads me back to review sites. Do you even care? You slap some winning stickers on some mobo's. and then go on to the next project you have to test. meanwhile your readers are stuck working with a product that in reality is half arsed garabage, they spent hunderds on, then countless hours patching, setting up, refining, etc etc, just to get it working... Doing the real testing, the testing companies should be doing, and reviewers should be checking.
All of the info is up on the first page - bold enough for all to see. The only poitive spin here is that we're glad someone is working with the M-ITX form factor because we genuinely want to see more vendors offer such products. That's what we're trying to promote.
DFI's mistake was openeing up overclocking functions on the shipping BIOS that the board is not realy designed to make use of. Keep the board a stock or below 160 BCLK and 99% of the issues I mentioned dissappear. Its not perfect, but the info is there and you decide if the issues mentioned are worthy of purchase or not. If not, then at least you got a heads up of what we found and the fact we asked for fixes. Having all of this on the front page is not an attempt to hide it or a cover angle. We give vendors 2 chances during the test period to respond with fixes, if they're not forthcoming we won't delay the review.
This board needs wireless to be complete. Wireless N preferred. With only one slot, and no OB video you're left in cold with regard to wireless unless you want dongles hanging off the back of case. DFI needs to consider wireless.
The 'conclusion' is on the first page. We changed the layout of motherboard articles few months ago just to provide you guys with all the info in one place.
Heh. It's supposed to e like that? I thought something broke.
Still, are some of the pages out of order? The benchmarks are four pages before the specs of what's being tested, so all through the graphs I was thinking "This tells me nothing. What was tested?".
2nd page is performance summary, for a quick overview (main tests) of how the board compares to others. After that, features/layout followed by the complete test resuslts.
It's amps. Stock TDP of some CPU's is more than 90 watts, so you'd be somewhat concerned if that were the max power limit of the board. 1.40 VID max with 90amps gives you a max wattage of 126w.
If DFI is marketing a motherboard for HTPC/DVR use then why use a chipset that basically supports mostly Quad Processors. May be overkill for HTPC. Might be nice to see more processor support for this socket.
If DFI provides the BIOS update, you can use the new Clarkdale Cire i3 & i5 CPUs with this board. You obviously can't use the onboard video, but the CPU should work fine.
I would expect to see H57 / H55 mini-itx boards in the next couple of months.
I'm using this board with a 5770 and a 860 in a Silverstone SG-06 case. I love it! I overclocked the bclock to 150 (w/ HT on) while leaving all of the voltages on Auto and its perfectly stable. Pushing beyond 150 bclock causes system instability. With 8 threads running in prime95 Vcore is at 1.15V (3.3GHz on 4 cores, 3.7GHz on 2 cores). Idle temps are in the upper 20s with all of the power saving features on. I'm using a Coolermaster GeminII S with a 120x20mm Yate Loon and it barely fits.
Great, I was thinking of using SG-06 with HD 5750 and i5-750 :)) Do you have some pics to post? What brand of 5770 do you have? Is it quiet enough when idle? Do you have any aditional fans on the case?
I mean, the GeminII does not have mounting options for 1156 chips
I'm waiting for the 450w psu for the SG05, anyway my Zotac 9300-D-E with an e8500@3.7Ghz and a GTS250 overclocked is enough for most console ports :D and HTPC duty
On the board features page, it lists 6x SATA ports from the chipset and 4x from a JMB322. If there are only 4 ports on the board, what's the point of the JMB322? And isn't the JMB322 a 1 or 2 port part?
Also, did DFI say who the target market was? Without an IGP and with limited SATA ports I'm having trouble thinking of any good usage scenarios for this board.
I was really hopeful for some good clarkdale mini-itx mobos, with only one chip in addition to the processor, it makes for better board layouts. I hope we'll start getting more case choices also, especially a few in server config. I'd love to make a mini-itx Raid box that can outdo the pre-built raid machines out there.
That is already possible using ion 330 based boards like the POV.
4 x sata and 1 x esata, 1Gb NIC supports jumbo frames with 7200 MTU under linux
Then just add a Chenbro ES34069 chassis with 4 x hot swap sata bays.
I can't seem to get Freenas working with jumbo frames as I suspect the NIC driver is not quiet up to speed under FreeBSD.
Ubuntu works perfectly though and I can easily get 80-100Mb/s off a 2 disk mirror.
Just waiting on more disks to see how raid 5 speed works out.
It is an expensive little chassis but it is also damn cool
Is Gary Key still writing for Anandtech? I noticed he hasn't posted in a while and his email address @anandtech bounced the other day, though I've successfully emailed him there before and gotten responses.
If he left, where did he go? His motherboard reviews were usually thorough, superb, and very much appreciated.
(Your review is fine, I am just wondering what happened to Gary Key.)
I can confirm that Gary left us to go work for someone else last month. I'm sure he'll still read the site, but his new job prevents him from writing for us now. We wish him the best, though!
Did you tell DFI about the reboot loop problem, S1 works fine but the GPU fan ramps up to 100% on S1 so it's unusable, and S3 has the aforementioned problem of random waking up and get stuck in a reboot loop.
S3 is VERY important on an HTPC board imho. S4 works too but it's still too slow for day to day usage.
If it can't be fixed guess I'll have to clock down to stock overclocking via software when gaming or get a passive cooled GTS250 instead of the current active cooled one.
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38 Comments
Back to Article
Mini Motherboard - Monday, January 11, 2010 - link
Thanks for great review. I have been waiting for someone to write about it. I have linked to your article on my blog at my [url=http://www.minimotherboard.com">http://www.minimotherboard.com]Mini-ITX blog[/url]Saosin - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
Mini-ITX review and no power consumption tests? :(Rajinder Gill - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
Page 2Rajinder Gill - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
Check page 2 in the performance summary :)ScavengerLX - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
I have my 860 on a MI P55 at 150bclock with HT on. While gaming core temps usually get up to the mid-60s. So far so good! Thats about as far as I can push it safely.ScavengerLX - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
Did you observe the PWM temps at 4.0GHz?Rajinder Gill - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
Hi,Not sure if you read the review in depth, but the 4GHz benches were for fixed frequency compare purposes only. I used a 120MM fan to blow air across the board just for the sake of running the game benches where the CPU loads are very light (only around 50 Celsius). If you're running the board in a case or stress testing (OCCT, Linpack etc), keep it at stock with HT enabled CPU's and at a max of say 3.6GHz with a 750 in a case.
later
Raja
LoneWolf15 - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
Any version on what Creative chip DFI is actually using?I'm guessing it's the cheapie they use on their gimped X-Fi XtremeAudio cards, since I haven't seen a real X-Fi chip on any board, but I was just curious.
Rajinder Gill - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
Hi,the X-FI features are purely software/drivers from Creative, supported by the Realtek ALC885. So no Creative hardware I'm afraid (I did mention software support in the feature table on page 3).
regards
Raja
ScavengerLX - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
Rajinder-Thanks for the great review. I have this motherboard so I appreciate the insight into the finer details.
Josh
michal1980 - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
Wrong.Why can't you reviewers, hold these manufactures feet to the flames.
Any one in the review business actually have a backbone?
I for one, am tired of what appear to be half hearted efforts on the part of Mobo manufactures to provide products that WORK.
Bios settings not working? Harddrives disappearing? Endless loops? Usb issues, with ding ding din, USB devices? WTF?
I've bought 'cheap' boards, i've bought higher end boards, i've bought everything in the middle, I've got boards with awesome reviews, boards with few reviews.
But just about each one has issues, needs various firmware updates, etc etc, just to hit a stable medium, and have all its features work. (well almost all).
And yet, no one, no one, in the review business seems to care. The slap (loosey using the word, since yes all the tests are alot of, at the end of the day, boring work) a few tests, or a battery they run. Post some benchmarkers, and basically call it a day. Not only that, but the bigger the reviewer, the more likely they have, and get access to actual support teams/ engineers, that get them around issues.
A regular cosumter? phhff, go on some forum and hope others have found the solution, because the CS you'll get is likely some idiot csr reading of a script, who's only goal in life is to churn support calls/emails to get a bonus, actually fixing a problem? HA.
BTW, problems which should have been caught by the manufacture INITIALY.
How hard is it to see if your bios settings actually do something? How hard is it to check how much power your board can supply without killing it self?
Which leads me back to review sites. Do you even care? You slap some winning stickers on some mobo's. and then go on to the next project you have to test. meanwhile your readers are stuck working with a product that in reality is half arsed garabage, they spent hunderds on, then countless hours patching, setting up, refining, etc etc, just to get it working... Doing the real testing, the testing companies should be doing, and reviewers should be checking.
Shame on all of you.
Rajinder Gill - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
Hi Michael,All of the info is up on the first page - bold enough for all to see. The only poitive spin here is that we're glad someone is working with the M-ITX form factor because we genuinely want to see more vendors offer such products. That's what we're trying to promote.
DFI's mistake was openeing up overclocking functions on the shipping BIOS that the board is not realy designed to make use of. Keep the board a stock or below 160 BCLK and 99% of the issues I mentioned dissappear. Its not perfect, but the info is there and you decide if the issues mentioned are worthy of purchase or not. If not, then at least you got a heads up of what we found and the fact we asked for fixes. Having all of this on the front page is not an attempt to hide it or a cover angle. We give vendors 2 chances during the test period to respond with fixes, if they're not forthcoming we won't delay the review.
regards
Raja
Zebo - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
Appreciate some reviews like this tech but no conclusions?Zebo - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
This board needs wireless to be complete. Wireless N preferred. With only one slot, and no OB video you're left in cold with regard to wireless unless you want dongles hanging off the back of case. DFI needs to consider wireless.Rajinder Gill - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
Hi Zebo,The 'conclusion' is on the first page. We changed the layout of motherboard articles few months ago just to provide you guys with all the info in one place.
regards
Raja
Mr Perfect - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
Heh. It's supposed to e like that? I thought something broke.Still, are some of the pages out of order? The benchmarks are four pages before the specs of what's being tested, so all through the graphs I was thinking "This tells me nothing. What was tested?".
Rajinder Gill - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
Hi2nd page is performance summary, for a quick overview (main tests) of how the board compares to others. After that, features/layout followed by the complete test resuslts.
regards
Raja
notposting - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Do you mean watts? I would love to see 90 (or 110) amps go through that thing.Rajinder Gill - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Hi,It's amps. Stock TDP of some CPU's is more than 90 watts, so you'd be somewhat concerned if that were the max power limit of the board. 1.40 VID max with 90amps gives you a max wattage of 126w.
later
Raja
piasabird - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
If DFI is marketing a motherboard for HTPC/DVR use then why use a chipset that basically supports mostly Quad Processors. May be overkill for HTPC. Might be nice to see more processor support for this socket.DigitalFreak - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
If DFI provides the BIOS update, you can use the new Clarkdale Cire i3 & i5 CPUs with this board. You obviously can't use the onboard video, but the CPU should work fine.I would expect to see H57 / H55 mini-itx boards in the next couple of months.
ScavengerLX - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
I'm using this board with a 5770 and a 860 in a Silverstone SG-06 case. I love it! I overclocked the bclock to 150 (w/ HT on) while leaving all of the voltages on Auto and its perfectly stable. Pushing beyond 150 bclock causes system instability. With 8 threads running in prime95 Vcore is at 1.15V (3.3GHz on 4 cores, 3.7GHz on 2 cores). Idle temps are in the upper 20s with all of the power saving features on. I'm using a Coolermaster GeminII S with a 120x20mm Yate Loon and it barely fits.I'm running all of this on the stock 300w PSU!
stefi - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
Great, I was thinking of using SG-06 with HD 5750 and i5-750 :)) Do you have some pics to post? What brand of 5770 do you have? Is it quiet enough when idle? Do you have any aditional fans on the case?Mr Perfect - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Nice build! That's about what I'm eyeing myself, assuming nothing new pops up at CES. :)It's impressive to see someone push the 300watt supply too. 1KW+ PSUs have been the norm for so long, that everyone automatically assumes you can't do jack with anything lower then 600 or so. That said, hopefully the 450(http://www.sffclub.com/index.php?option=com_conten...">http://www.sffclub.com/index.php?option...amp;cati... replaces the 300 in Silverstone's cases.
fr500 - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
How!!!I mean, the GeminII does not have mounting options for 1156 chips
I'm waiting for the 450w psu for the SG05, anyway my Zotac 9300-D-E with an e8500@3.7Ghz and a GTS250 overclocked is enough for most console ports :D and HTPC duty
fr500 - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Edit: Duh I just realized you said GeminII S. My badGeorgeH - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
On the board features page, it lists 6x SATA ports from the chipset and 4x from a JMB322. If there are only 4 ports on the board, what's the point of the JMB322? And isn't the JMB322 a 1 or 2 port part?Also, did DFI say who the target market was? Without an IGP and with limited SATA ports I'm having trouble thinking of any good usage scenarios for this board.
Rajinder Gill - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Hi George,That was my mistake on the SATA ports. I used a template XLS and forgot to delete some of the cell data. It's fixed now.
thanks!
Raja
tomoyo - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
I was really hopeful for some good clarkdale mini-itx mobos, with only one chip in addition to the processor, it makes for better board layouts. I hope we'll start getting more case choices also, especially a few in server config. I'd love to make a mini-itx Raid box that can outdo the pre-built raid machines out there.zer0sum - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
That is already possible using ion 330 based boards like the POV.4 x sata and 1 x esata, 1Gb NIC supports jumbo frames with 7200 MTU under linux
Then just add a Chenbro ES34069 chassis with 4 x hot swap sata bays.
I can't seem to get Freenas working with jumbo frames as I suspect the NIC driver is not quiet up to speed under FreeBSD.
Ubuntu works perfectly though and I can easily get 80-100Mb/s off a 2 disk mirror.
Just waiting on more disks to see how raid 5 speed works out.
It is an expensive little chassis but it is also damn cool
Z
yacoub - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Is Gary Key still writing for Anandtech? I noticed he hasn't posted in a while and his email address @anandtech bounced the other day, though I've successfully emailed him there before and gotten responses.If he left, where did he go? His motherboard reviews were usually thorough, superb, and very much appreciated.
(Your review is fine, I am just wondering what happened to Gary Key.)
JarredWalton - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
I can confirm that Gary left us to go work for someone else last month. I'm sure he'll still read the site, but his new job prevents him from writing for us now. We wish him the best, though!yacoub - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Ah okay, thanks for the update. I guess he's working for one of the companies who make products you guys review, not another news site? :)JarredWalton - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Yeah, I thinks it's okay for us to mention he's at ASUS now.yacoub - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Oh very cool! :)vol7ron - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
I like to see more reviews of mini-ITX. Cases and boards.This is the year of the HTPC.
DigitalFreak - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Surprisingly enough, the price isn't bad. $134 @ Newegg.fr500 - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
Hi anandDid you tell DFI about the reboot loop problem, S1 works fine but the GPU fan ramps up to 100% on S1 so it's unusable, and S3 has the aforementioned problem of random waking up and get stuck in a reboot loop.
S3 is VERY important on an HTPC board imho. S4 works too but it's still too slow for day to day usage.
If it can't be fixed guess I'll have to clock down to stock overclocking via software when gaming or get a passive cooled GTS250 instead of the current active cooled one.