Motherboard ITX-Motherboard Recommendations
- Thread starter XCOM-SFF
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https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Z170I-PRO-GAMING/
Seems like a solid choice with most of the important features.
Seems like a solid choice with most of the important features.
I do like the Asus Maximus 8, however I'm concerned that I won't be able to fit a small form factor CPU fan as the sound card is rather large, what do you think?
Other options i'm considering is the EVGA Z170
Other options i'm considering is the EVGA Z170
M.2 is the form factor...there are also U.2 and add-in cards that use the same controllers and have the same potential speeds. PCI-e is the electrical interface and NVMe (or AHCI) is the protocol. NVMe PCI-e drives can be up over 5x faster than a SATA III connection, but the controller on the NVMe PCI-e drive will probably be a limiting factor. The new Samsung SM961 can saturate the PCI-e link on sequential reads, but any writes and non-sequential reads would still be controller limited. There is also the potential for thermal throttling of NVMe PCI-e drives.
Thunderbolt would be done separately...you'd need to feed the DisplayPort into a Thunderbolt card. However, no ITX board has a 5-pin Thunderbolt interface for an add-in card. I don't know if there are any ITX boards with Thunderbolt 3 built-in...I believe the Gigabyte board doesn't have it due to not enough space in the BIOS.
I think the Asus M8I was poorly designed, regardless of the space on it for the cooler. Nether the M8I or the EVGA Z170 Stinger support M.2. The Z170I Pro Gaming board that Phuncz suggested above may be the best option. The Asrock Z170 Gaming -ITX/ac may be another option to consider.
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Regarding M.2, it depends on the drive.
There are 3 options really. B keyed drives are going to still be SATA III, or 2x PCIe and are going to be the cheaper option (usually the drives are keyed for both B and M so will have two notches). The PCIe will be a bit faster depending on if it uses the old AHCI controller What SATA runs which isn't optimized for SSD random access or the newer NVMe which is. M keyed drives (which will only have a single notch) will almost always be 4x PCIe which is much faster and are more likely to be using NVMe.
So, if you actually want a faster drive, check for the specs to mention PCIe and preferably NVMe as well, since if you get a SATA based M.2 drive you aren't getting anything you wouldn't already get from a 2.5 inch drive other than a smaller form factor and are likely to pay a capacity penalty and price markup.
There are 3 options really. B keyed drives are going to still be SATA III, or 2x PCIe and are going to be the cheaper option (usually the drives are keyed for both B and M so will have two notches). The PCIe will be a bit faster depending on if it uses the old AHCI controller What SATA runs which isn't optimized for SSD random access or the newer NVMe which is. M keyed drives (which will only have a single notch) will almost always be 4x PCIe which is much faster and are more likely to be using NVMe.
So, if you actually want a faster drive, check for the specs to mention PCIe and preferably NVMe as well, since if you get a SATA based M.2 drive you aren't getting anything you wouldn't already get from a 2.5 inch drive other than a smaller form factor and are likely to pay a capacity penalty and price markup.
Recent intel chips have only marginal perfomance increases over previous generations when comparing similar clock speeds. If an older chip can clock higher than the new ones, it will be able to make up for this deficit. You are right though, for Skylake vs Haswell, I think in most cases the Skylake chip will always win.
However if you compare a HEDT board with more mainstream boards, such as in the case of Z170 vs X99, the X99 haswell is capable of using larger processors with 6-22 cores. For older games these extra cores wont give you a benefit but for new games they may see a bonus. Moving into the future they may see even more bonus, especially if you do live streaming or anything else in the background.
If you are looking at $200 Z170 ITX boards and an i7 6700k, I think the X99+i7 5820k will be similar in price and offer more upgrade choices in the future while giving significantly better multi-threaded performance out of the box.
The Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming-ITX/ac is also worth considering, as the only Z170 board with out-of-the-box PCIe Bifurcation support, in case you want to try out multi-GPU later. It has a full 6x SATA ports rather than the 4x most non-Gigabyte ITX Z170 boards appear to have, as well as 6x USB 3 ports from the Intel PCH (though the 2x Type A and Type C USB 3.1 are from an ASMedia controller). It is also the only ITX board I know of with 3x PWM fan headers, and with HDMI 2.0 rather than HDMI 1.3 on-board (if on-board video is a priority). On the downside its wireless card is mPCIe rather than m.2, so only has Bluetooth 4.0 rather than 4.1/4.2 other Z170 boards have. It also has a silly name.
