Mini-ITX motherboards are becoming a bit of a trend in the PC enthusiast market, people want to see how much performance they can cram into small spaces. Z77 triggered a wave of mini ITX motherboards from the likes of EVGA, ASUS, Gigabyte and so on. But these weren’t just any mini-ITX motherboards they were mini-ITX motherboards ram packed with high-end features and aimed at enthusiasts. So far I haven’t really seen much in the way of Z87 mini-ITX motherboards until today when I saw the first pictures of Gigabyte’s Z87 mini-ITX motherboard the Z87N-WiFi.
The Gigabyte Z87N-WiFi unsurprisingly comes with an onboard WiFi solution, that uses 802.11ac WLAN technology. The motherboard uses the LGA 1150 socket and Z87 chipset for Intel’s Haswell processors that are due out next month. There is a four phase VRM for the CPU socket area and there are dual DDR3 DIMM slots to support one pair of dual channel RAM, probably up to 32GB. A full length PCI Express 3.0 16X slot is supported so you can add a beefy video card. The Gigabyte Z87N-WiFi also has four SATA III ports for internal storage, that means all the included SATA ports are SATA III.
Over on the rear IO panel we’ve got two USB 2.0, a PS/2 combo port, four USB 3.0 ports, dual ethernet LAN, 8 channel HD audio, DVI-D out and dual HDMI out.
No doubt this mini-ITX motherboard from Gigabyte will be a Z87 power house that will form the basis of many small form factor gaming rigs. I look forward to seeing what ASUS, EVGA and others offer in the Z87 mini-ITX space.
What are your thoughts on this offering from Gigabyte?
This looks pretty much identical to the H77 and Z77 mITX boards they have out now.
I certainly wouldn’t be interested in buying one.