Hardware ASRock X99E-ITX/ac Review

Oh yes! The one I've been waiting for.

 

I don't get this

 

Its the only way to get #allofthecores in to an ITX based system.

Z170 itx will be skylake and 4cores/8 threads.

X99 is 8 cores 16 threads potential.

it all depends on what you need and how much space you have, whats not to get?

 

If you really need 8 overclocked 2011 cores in an itx rig, I guess this is it. mATX makes such better use of those CPUs though....

 

But does it really? That much better?

I think this board is great for those ready to get a little creative in order to make a Mac Pro tabletop competitor.

 

8 cores? Try 18!

For gaming alone we're probably a few years off a time when more than 4 cores will offer an appreciable advantage, even with Dx12. Indeed, a current Devil's Canyon Haswell will outperform a non-OC Haswell-E, as almost certainly will a high-end Skylake. But for anything that CAN benefit from more than 4 cores, Haswell-E is still going to be king for some time (Broadwell-E is unlikely to be a noticeable bump, for that we'll need to wait a good year for Skylake-E).

 

i went ITX with Asus Z97i-Plus for $140Canadian, and will NEVER go back to other form factor.

It is awesome.

Got a Zotac 970GTX in there for $365. 8GB of RAM and i5 4670K and 2x SSD doing RAID-0 for $99 a pop. How can you not love a fighter like that for under $1k?

 

Really? Really? Don't you guys run a spellcheck before submitting your articles?

Pedantry aside, this looks like a great wee board, even if it is pretty niche. I'm all for this sort of thing, as I love me some ITX and it's awesome that we can have X99 goodness in this form factor (even though a couple of compromises have to be made with coolers and "only" dual-channel RAM, but these are non-issues imo).

As an aside, does dual-channel RAM actually make any realworld difference compared to quad-channel? I recall a big fuss being made back in the day about dual vs single channel, but in the real world the difference is negligible as far as I can see.

 

Sounds faddy to me, I'd want all my pci-e lanes and RAM modules.

 

Vanishingly few tasks take advantage of extra DDR channels, mainly batch image editing, video effects editing (but surprisingly not encoding), and some scientific workloads.
The real pain from only having two DIMM slots is that you need to buy bigger DIMMs for the same total installed capacity, and cost doesn't usually scale linearly with DIMM size.

If you really need 4 channels, ASrockRack have an ITX X99 board with 4 DDR4 SODIMM slots.

 

The article appears to thank Corsair for supplying a Cooler Master AIO cooler.

 

Much better in theory, at least Looking at the benchmarks the lack of ram bandwidth (although the capacity limit is a bother) is of very little importance, and people who know what they want from an 8/16 CPU will know if they can work with this or not.

 

I keep thinking about putting a miniITX system together (have a Sun Voyager that is dead to repurpose), this however might be a bit overkill for both my needs and budget

 

Whilst i struggle to see 'the point' of this, there must be one and there must be a sufficient market for it, or they wouldn't have bothered...

 

Well, I bought one before this review came out and i'm happy with it. Did have to make my own mounting bracket for the CPU cooler I already had, but thats a small price to pay for the substantial performance boost on video and 3D work