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This ASRock board is great, although I bought it at a bit lower of a price point, so that might affect this review.
Compared to other Z97 ITX boards in this range, this board has a M.2 SSD socket, and 6x SATA, as well as a SATA Express slot - stuff that you would expect on a full ATX sized board.
The main difference I see against other boards in the same price range is the lack of dual ethernet, which would be an important factor if you were using the box as a soft router of some sort. I was not, so the single ethernet port didn't bother me.
The BIOS and configuration are high quality, and you can do updates straight from the BIOS screen, which is convenient. I have the BIOS set the ultra-fast boot mode, and it boots into Windows 8 almost instantly.
Overall, this motherboard is a great choice for a HTPC or a home upnp/NAS server box.
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This is my first ASRock board. Well second, if you count the first Z97E-ITX/AC that arrived and failed to POST. Since I bought it on Amazon,the RMA process was a breeze, and it only took two days for me to get a replacement. The second Z97-EITX/AC POSTed like a champ. Working with this board, I appreciated the gold plated contacts inside each of the the DIMM slots, but more attention could have been put on the IO shields. The Wifi antenna looks really nice and provides me with great signal strength. It comes with a one-time use sticky pad so you can hang it just about anywhere. It's functional and works, but I think a magnet or an option to wall mount the antenna would have been more useful.
I love the 12K capacitors ASRock uses on these motherboards. What a great touch. I remember years ago Dell had a nasty problem with bad capacitors in their Optiplex 755 line. So anytime I see manufacturers talk about the types of capacitors they use, I definitely pay attention. The extra attention placed on the PCB construction and the efficient power delivery system wasn't lost on me either. To make the best of an already awesome power delivery system I decided to power this board using a Seasonic 80+ Platinum fanless 520 watt power supply unit.
With a clean source of 520 watts and single +12v rail rated for 42 Amps I'm running an i7-4790K (4.0Ghz Haswell-Refresh) chilled by a Corsair H100i AIO Water cooler, 16GB (8Gb x 2) DDR3 at 1600 Mhz, and a EVGA GeForce GTX 770 SuperClocked 2GB graphics card. Originally I ordered an MSI Radeon R9 280X Twin Frozr Gaming OC 3GB video card, but I wasn't able to get it to work with this board without getting severe screen flickering in 2D and 3D applications. The EVGA with Nvidia's GTX 770 GPU is just phenomenal.Read more ›
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