The small form factor crowd has grown in leaps and bounds over the last few years. Every day on Facebook or some other spot on the internet you will see some pretty impressive builds with tiny motherboards stuffed in them. However, one of the things that has always seemed to be missing I full chipset support. Most of the time you can find mini-ITX boards running business or consumer chipsets. Fortunately, this trend has been changing and we are seeing more powerful boards hitting the market. We have one of these newer boards in the lab in the form of the Asus Z97I Plus. This Z97 chipset based board is intended to put all the power and features of larger boards into a tiny package. Let’s see how well Asus does at reaching this goal.
Features -In the current market motherboard (and indeed almost all component) performance is very close. The days of a large performance advantage between boards using the same chipset are long gone. That is unless someone makes a HUGE mistake (like runs traces completely wrong). Now, the thing that differentiates different products is the features. These are things like power management, extra slots, better audio CODECs etc. It is these items that R&D teams work so hard to drop into what are really identical pieces of hardware at their most basic level.
Excellent – Audio amplifier and Filter capsFull Z97 chipsetAudio Channel separationM.2 SATA Connector802.11ac wireless
We cannot say this enough, Asus’ attention to the audio on this board is something that puts it well ahead of other Mini-ITX boards on the market. Even looking at just the layout and design it is an impressive feature. The addition of an M.2 connector and 802.11ac wireless is just icing on an already nice cake.
In the middle (sort of good) -Intel Gigabit LANFull 8-Pin Aux power connector
These two options add more to the appeal of the board. Dropping in a full 8-piin power connector gives you more options for overclocking while the Intel LAN should give you consistent and industry standard performance for your network, if you go wired over wireless.
Floor Mats -USB 3.0USB 2.0
Well… yeah at this stage of the game if you do not have these two… you should not even bother.
