Test System And Methodology
We used the following pre-defined test system – only the motherboard varies between reviews. We only compare results where consistent components have been used.
Z87 Motherboard Test System
- Motherboard – Varies by review
- Processor – Intel Core i7 4770K at Stock With Turbo Enabled
- RAM – 16GB (2 X 8GB) Corsair Vengeance Pro Series at 2400MHz and 10-12-12-31-2T
- Graphics Card – XFX HD 7970 Double Dissipation (Stock Clocks)
- CPU Cooler – Corsair H100i (Quiet at stock and Performance at overclocked) with Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Paste
- Power Supply – Corsair HX1050W
- Main Storage Drive – Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD over SATA III interface
- Additional Storage Drive – Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD over SATA III interface
- Chassis – Lian Li PC-T60 Test Bench
- Display – Dell U2711 Ultra Sharp @ 1080p
- Operating System – Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
We would like to thank Asus, Intel, AMD, Corsair, Kingston, Lian Li, Noctua and all our other partners who supplied us with test equipment and hardware. Their generosity makes our testing possible and without them we wouldn’t be able to produce the reviews we do, so thank you!
For the testing procedures we use a variety of professional software and free to use programs which you can see below. The full details of each test will be available preceding the graphs if you are interested in the details for purposes of result replication or further enquiry.
Software used:
- 3DMark 11 (Professional)
- AIDA64 Engineer Edition (Professional)
- Cinebench R15 (Free)
- CPU-Z (Free)
- PCMark 7 (Professional)
- Super PI (Free)
- 3DMark (2013) (Professional)
- Rightmark Audio Analyser (Free)
I recently cobbled a mini ITX system together for myself with spare parts I had lying about some of which included a Bitfenix Prodigy case, a MSI R9 290 GFX, i5 4670K CPU and an Asus Z87 Gryphon mobo, a reasonably decent gaming build you’ll agree. While everything worked fine (it was a pain in the ass to hide the full length PSU cables) it all ran far too hot for my liking especially the GFX which reached a toasty and cacophonous 92 deg under testing. Needless to say I disassembled it, packed everything away in their boxes again and returned to my tried and tested ATX system. Mini ITX makes sense in a lot of ways especially in the HTPC arena but it’s not everybody’s cuppa tea and definitely not mine, I’m a gamer at heart.
That’s more to do with the R9 290 being a hot card tbh… if you used GTX 780 you’;d get much better temps I think 😛
It is a very hot running card at the best of times made even worse in small enclosures, add that to the fact that my sample used a reference cooler. On an open test bench I recorded temps of ~ 83 deg. The temps could probably be improved a bit with a quality and correctly applied TIM. Don’t get me wrong, I like the mini ITX form factor but they have their limitations.
BTW. I liked the review. Thanks.
I agree the form factor is limited but what you can do with the form factor seems to be improving significantly every year…it wasn’t THAT long ago that we could only get Atom CPUs in the ITX form factor and the only cases that were available were hideous enterprise-style boxes. I think anyone building an ITX system from scratch (and out of their own money 😉 ) is likely to use an Nvidia card GTX 750Ti-GTX 780Ti depending on budget. And thanks, glad you liked it.
I run an i7-4770K, with the MSI Gaming AC Mini itx board and a EVGA GTX 760 w/ACX in a bitfenix. My temps are perfectly fine. I think its the R9 290. I’ve heard they run really hot
Amazing really, especially when you will learn it still has a fully fetched PCIe x16 slot, KillerNIC Gigabit Ethernet, WIFI, USB 3.0 and heck even four SATA 6 Gbps ports. To make things even tastier we pair it with a GeForce GTX 760 GAMING ITX graphics card, and the combo… well it’s just awesome. http://num.to/457-287-619-226