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.
The Box and Goodies -As you would expect the box that the Mini-ITX Z97I Plus comes in is very small. The front contains references some quality numbers including 7,000+ hours of validation time for the design. Asus did drop in some Intel related logos, but that is pretty normal now.
The back is a more typical box in miniature. You get a small picture of the board with labels for the major parts on the board. Asus also dives a little deeper into what those numbers on the front meant.
You also get a specification listing and some words about the audio and network performance just to make sure you get that this is a solid choice for gaming.
Inside the box we find the Z97I Plus. Directly underneath that you will find all of the accessories. Asus has included two SATA cables, an antenna for the 802.11ac wireless adapter, an I/O Shield, manual, driver DVD, and an adapter for the front end header that looks like it was custom made to help keep things very clean.
So with all of that out of the way, let’s take a closer look at the Z97I Plus and see what Asus has packed into this tiny package.
