ASRock Z68M-ITX/HT Mini-ITX Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. Packaging and Bundle3. The ASRock Z68M-ITX/HT Motherboard4. The ASRock Z68M-ITX/HT: BIOS5. Testing Methodology6. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 20127. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.58. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage9. Synthetic: 3DMark 1110. Synthetic: PCMark 711. Real World: Blu-Ray Playback12. Real World: MKV Playback13. Real World: Flash HD Playback14. Real World: Media Encoding15. Gaming: DiRT 316. Gaming: F1 201017. Gaming: Call of Duty: Black Ops18. Closing Thoughts19. View All Pages

ASRock have worked hard in the last year to compete with the big players such as ASUS and Gigabyte in the enthusiast sector.  Products like the 990FX Fatal1ty motherboard that we looked at a few months back show just how far they have come and how they can now compete with the big boys.

Today we are going to look at a motherboard from the other end of the ASRock range, the Z68M-ITX/HT motherboard, which occupies the increasingly popular Mini-ITX form factor.  This makes it ideal for use in environments where space is restricted, mainly in small form factor and home theatre PC systems.

Despite having to cram all of the components into a small space, ASRock haven't compromised very much on features with the Z68M-ITX/HT, giving you the potential to build a very powerful system around this motherboard should you wish.

The Z68M-ITX/HT is supplied in quite a large box for a Mini-ITX motherboard which suggests to us that they may have included some extra goodies within alongside their usual accessory bundle.  ASRock have decided to decorate the front of the box with a minimalist livery which only features a large ‘ASRock Z68M-ITX/HT' logo on a grey metal effect background.

Turning the box over reveals a plethora of information about the motherboard within, including it's main features, technical specification and some estimated performance figures.  There is also a labelled diagram which illustrates some of the key features of the motherboard.

Opening up the box reveals the generous bundle that ASRock include with the motherboard.  It is clear that they have designed this motherboard with HTPC users in mind as they include a multimedia remote.  We also find a software CD and manual inside the box alongside two SATA cables, a 3.5mm audio cable and an I/O shield.

ASRock have chosen to use a black PCB with dark blue fittings for this model which should make it relatively easy to colour co-ordinate your system.  The motherboard measures 17 x 17 cm (6.7 x 6.7-in). Those who are used to working with standard ATX and Micro-ATX motherboards will notice that there are a number of ways in which the layout of a Mini-ITX motherboard differs due to the substantially smaller PCB used.

As usual, the two DDR3 RAM slots are located on the right hand edge of the motherboard with the CPU socket located to the left.  You will need to be careful when selecting a CPU cooler to use with this motherboard as we tried a number of models which wouldn't fit when RAM and a graphics card were installed, including the Arctic Cooling Freezer 11 Low Profile.  In the end, we fitted the Thermaltake Contac29 BP to the motherboard as this didn't interfere with any of the other components.

Along the bottom edge of the motherboard we find a PCI Express x 16 slot which we would recommend populating with a graphics card for the best performance results.  If you're planning to build a HTPC with a passively cooled graphics card, it is worth considering that many have heatsinks on both sides of the PCB which may interfere with the CPU cooler.  Unfortunately this was certainly the case with our HIS Radeon HD5550 Silence.

We find all of the internal connectors and headers along the top edge of the motherboard.  There are four SATA connectors in total, two SATA-600 and two SATA-300, which should be adequate to satisfy the requirements of most users.  There are also two USB2.0 headers, the front panel header, a 4-pin CPU power header and two fan headers located in this area of the board.

ASRock have all the bases covered when it comes to I/O connections.  From left to right we find two USB2.0 ports, a PS/2 connector, VGA, DVI and HDMI outputs, two further USB2.0 connectors, an eSATA connector, an RJ-45 Ethernet jack, two USB3.0 ports, five 3.5mm audio jacks and an optical S/PDIF output.

ASRock have used their usual format of UEFI which contains all the features we would usually look for.  There is even a built in utility for flashing the BIOS to the latest version which simplifies the process enormously.

Being a Mini-ITX motherboard, we wouldn't expect a substantial overclock from the Z68M-ITX/HT.  While there are some overclocking options in the BIOS, we are very limited with what we can do.  The most restricting omission is the lack of any voltage controls with the exception of DRAM voltage.

We settled on a turbo-mode overclock of 4.3 GHz with our Intel Core-i5 2500K as the motherboard doesn't allow you to overclock the standard CPU multiplier.  This was achieved with a turbo multiplier of 43x, leaving the baseclock at 100 MHz.  We had to use stock voltage as we weren't able to adjust the voltage.

For our tests, we used a Thermaltake Contac29 to cool the Intel Core-i5 2500K CPU and used a NZXT Hale90 750W power supply for the system.

Test System

Motherboard: ASRock Z68M-ITX/HT
CPU: Intel Core-i5 2500K
Memory: 4 GB (2x 2GB) Corsair XMS3 1600 MHz
Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 6790
Power Supply: NZXT Hale90 750W
Cooler: Thermaltake Contac29
Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-3
Drive: Crucial M4 256 GB
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit

Other Hardware

Viewsonic VX2260WM 1920 x 1080 Monitor

Software:

SiSoft Sandra 2011 SP3
Cinebench R11.5
3DMark 11
3DMark Vantage
PCMark 7
CrystalDiskMark
Cyberlink PowerDVD 11
Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6
DiRT 3
F1 2010
Call of Duty: Black Ops

All tests are averaged from a series of five separate runs. This ensures that no abnormalities can creep into the final, published results.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)

• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)

• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)

• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor

• MC – Multi-Core

• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading

• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions

• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics

• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access

• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86

• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

The test system performed very well in this test, showing a decent bump in performance when overclocked.

Cinebench R11.5 is the newest revision of the popular benchmark from Maxon. The test scenario uses all of your system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral “No Keyframes” animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores.

In fact, CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

In this test we can see the performance benefits of multi-threaded applications, especially when the system was overclocked.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

In this test we saw a big improvement in CPU performance when we overclocked the system.  But this did seem to come at the cost of graphics performance which decreased very slightly.  The overall score did increase, though.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

Again we saw a big improvement in the physics score in this test but this came at the cost of graphics.  This actually caused the overall score to decrease when the system was overclocked.

PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

A great score for our test system in PCMark with a small performance gain when the system was overclocked.

Our good friends at Cyberlink kindly supplied the software for our BluRay and conversion tests.

Cyberlink PowerDVD 11 is one of the finest solutions for the BluRay experience on Windows and we found this software to work perfectly with this chipset. We tested with the Blu-Ray Disc of Independence Day.

Our test system coped playing a Blu-Ray movie without breaking a sweat, leaving plenty of clock cycles for other tasks.

Many people who have media systems will be familiar with the Matroska (.mkv) file format which is often used for high definition video. In this test we will be using VLC Media Player to play a 1080P MKV file while recording CPU usage using Performance Monitor.

Our MKV playback test required a little more power than Blu-Ray playback but the CPU utilisation remained below 15% for the majority of the test.

Many people using this system will be enjoying Flash related content so we feel it is important to test with some of the more demanding material available freely online. Full hardware acceleration is enabled.

Again, the test system performed very well in this test, making a strong case for this setup for use in a HTPC.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6.5 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 1.09GB 720p MKV file (44mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version of this program. We tested with hardware acceleration off and at reference clock speeds, then with hardware acceleration on and in an overclocked state.

With hardware acceleration enabled and in our overclocked state, the time was reduced to 9 minutes and 13 seconds.

DiRT 3 was released quite recently and has received a lot of praise from gamers and reviewers across the globe. It is the latest iteration of the Colin McRae Rally series, despite Codemasters dropping the Colin McRae branding. It supports DirectX 11 which enhances detail and brings a number of other visual enhancements to the gaming experience.

Some great framerates for our test system in this test.  This shows that you can easily build a capable small form factor gaming system around this motherboard.

F1 2010 is the first multi format high def Formula one title, having been in development for almost 2 and a half years now you can tell Codemasters are not messing around when it comes to releasing the best game they can. F1 2010 is packed with everything, from fine tuning your car setup, practising laps with goals to achieve, detailed stats, various difficulty settings for newbs and pros and even a helmet selection!

Another solid set of framerates from this test system.

Call of Duty Black Ops is a first person shooter around 50 years ago and is the latest game in the Call of Duty franchise. While many gamers favour the previous iteration, Modern Warfare 2, Black Ops is played by millions of gamers across the globe and doesn’t require top end kit to achieve a playable experience. So it is a perfect game to test with the AMD Vision A8-3850 APU.

We were able to achieve a very decent set of framerates in Call of Duty even when gaming at 1080p.

Overall we are left with generally positive impressions of the ASRock Z68M-ITX/HT motherboard.  ASRock have catered to all the features required to make a good Mini-ITX motherboard and have even included a multimedia remote for HTPC users.  The system performed well in our tests and showed a reasonable boost in performance when overclocked.

We do have a few small niggles with this motherboard, though.  Firstly, the CPU socket isn't positioned ideally which can make it difficult to find a suitable CPU cooler.  We found the low profile Arctic Freezer 11 LP wouldn't actually fit when we had a graphics card installed and had to resort to a much larger Thermaltake Contac29 instead.  So we would recommend not straying too far from the stock Intel cooler when building with this system.

This may sound like an issue for those who plan to overclock but due to space restrictions on the PCB, the overclocking potential of this board is very limited anyway.  We managed to overclock our Intel Core-i5 2500K to 4.3 GHz without issue but pushing it further is difficult as we aren't available to adjust the core voltage. In fairness, if you are building a media center such as this, the overclocking capabilities really shouldn't be that important.

The ASRock Z68M-ITX/HT motherboard can be yours for a shade under £95 at eBuyer.  We think this is quite good value for money as it is quite a bit cheaper than alternatives like the Zotac Z68ITX-A-E.

Pros:

• Decent value.
• Performs well.
• Good connectivity.
• Attractive UEFI.

Cons:

• Layout isn't ideal.
• Overclocking potential is limited.

KitGuru says: A good option for those looking to build a powerful small form factor or home theatre PC.

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