Which Mini ITX Board is Better?

[Trax0r-DnB]

I am in dire need of advice for my next build in the Bitfenix Prodigy (Gaming/LAN rig). It would be a toss-up between these three mini itx boards:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z77E-ITX/

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1155/P8Z77I_DELUXE/

http://teksyndicate.com/news/2012/07/19/evga-release-mini-itx-z77-motherboard (of course, considering it will be out in the next month and a half)

My main concerns are with power delivery as I will be slapping my overclocked GTX570 Beast Edition (Core:870;Mem:1900;Volt:1063mV), i5-2500K including an H100 in a push-pull configuration (overclocked to 4,2Ghz), an OCZ Vertex 3 and a Seagate Barracuda 3TB hard drive all running off a Silverstone SST-ST85F-P 850W power supply.

The Asus board seems to have take care of the power delivery situation with their beefy looking power design protruding vertically from the board. However, the Asus board is horribly over-priced is my opinion. How does the Asrock board compare to the Asus one considering the current overclocks on my system? I am well aware that the EVGA board has not yet been released but is there any indication to how it will perform?

Thanks in advance for any help/tips/advice

All the best

Jared

 

[jamesriley94]

I'd go with the ASUS, unless the EVGA is a very reasonable price. I dont like the asrock because the cpu socket is too close to the pcie lane - so eliminates any possibility of an air cooler in the future or something.
Unless you're reusing the OCZ SSD, dont buy a new one.

I think all the boards will be sufficient in providing the power to the cpu and card, shouldnt be a problem there

 

[Trax0r-DnB]

Thank you sooo much for the speedy response and great advice!
I am reusing the Vertex 3 SSD. Oh, how I wish I had waited a while longer so that I could have bought a Samsung 830, Adata XPG SX900, OCZ Vertex 4 or Kingston HyperX 3K SSD -.-

 

[jamesriley94]

No - Generally OCZ is terrible...

Avoid every one of their power supplies and SSDs at all costs.

 

[Ozydious]

That EVGA board looks amazing... I'm building a rig very similar to yours soon and I'd not even seen that board... I may have to wait a little longer THANK YOU!

 

[Trax0r-DnB]

@jamesriley94 : I can't comment on their power supplies as I have personally had one. I have to disagree with you on your opinion of their SSDs. My Vertex 3 has performed flawlessly; not a single blue screen or system crash. The performance of the drive also correlates to the advertised speeds as I have run benchmarks myself with ATTO and Crystal DiskMark.
Many uninformed idiots do not know how to treat an SSD by for example performing disk defragments, not enabling AHCI SATA mode in the UEFI/BIOS and windows registry (instead of IDE), not updating the firmware of their products, generally installing junk on their machines and the list goes on and on!
I am truly if you had a bad experience with any OCZ products but I always base my opinion on personal experiences...not those of others, although I do take those into consideration.

Now back to the topic at hand.

@Ozydious : What sort of specs will your build have? I am really interested to know opcorn:

 

[jamesriley94]

They tend to use very cheap components on both their SSDs and their PSUs. I did use to have a PSU which I didnt have any problems with, although it was 750w, and I was barely putting 500w through it at peak.
As for the SSDs, I have had one fail myself. No crashes or anything, just dead after 2 months, and many users on these forums have had the same issues.
It's not about personal opinions: http://translate.googleusercontent....d.html&usg=ALkJrhjjDpyfMlvKziRH0fjbsVMHBBotUA

They are the return rates of OCZ drives, and frankly, any company that has a 15% return rate one a product, and generally high return rates across the board, I would not trust - especially on something like an SSD. Also, consider those return rates will mostly be in the first year or so of the drives being around, as SSDs are still relatively new, so expect real life figures to be significantly higher than that.

We just have general consensus on these forums to never buy OCZ products, and never buy Thermaltake products

 

[Trax0r-DnB]

Well said.
I have heard bad things about the older generation SSDs (Vertex 3 and older) but all the tech review sites/forum pages I have visited have only had positive reviews of the Vertex 4. Has OCZ made a change for the better concerning their SSDs?
This leads to my next question: What 120/128GB SSD (used as the OS boot drive) would you suggest at the moment? Obviously in a reasonable price range (110€-130€), which would automatically exclude companies such as Intel and Plextor.

 

[jamesriley94]

Crucial M4 - any day.
The listed speeds are irrelevant, as the 'max speeds' are at 1024k whereas windows can only use 4k and 8k speeds - at which the Crucial is actually one of the fastest.

And yes - the Vertex 4 does have good reviews, but as it's still fairly new - I'd like to see how it stands the test of time before voicing my own thoughts on it.

Also, the hard drive company Seagate are looking to take over OCZ so things may change - although as Seagate are the OCZ of the HDD world atm - it is unclear if it is likely to be a turn for the better or worse.

Why excluding Intel may I ask?

 

[Trax0r-DnB]

Up until recently the Intel drives were extremely reliable (big ups!) but were quite pricey.
Just checked my favourite online store and there must have been massive price drops!
My mistake