ASRock Z97E-ITX/AC High-End Z97 Mini-itx Mb Boasts 2t2r 802.11ac Wifi, M.2 Socket, and Sata Express Interface

Why I bought it/Features:This board has a great mix of features and form factor. I bought it because it was one of the very few Mini ITX boards with an m.2 slot (It's on the bottom of the board, not pictured in the official Asrock photos). It also has 4 SATA 6 ports, an additional 2 SATA6 ports which double as a SATA Express port, an Intel NIC, great quality capacitors and an overall well designed layout.It also has a mini PCI Express slot that comes pre-packaged with a Broadcom 802.11ac wireless card and a good-enough antenna, an HDMI-In port (so you can plug the HDMI output from another device and pass the HDMI signal through to your monitor/TV), and special audio capacitors (which, from my research,l are nice, but not stellar).Layout:The boards layout is mostly great. The ATX power plug is at the back of the board, so you don't have to snake the PSU cable across the rest of the components. The front panel connectors are in the bottom corner next to the USB 3.0 connectors, making it easy to route these cables out of the way for aesthetics/cleanliness/dust control. The memory slots are the kind that only have a single-sided latch with the latch mechanism on the opposite side from the PCI Express slot so you can swap memory in and out without having to worry about your graphics card.The challenges with the layout are the SATA ports being right between the PCI Express slot, the CPU keep out zone, and the memory slots (There's just not a great place to put them on a board this small!), the auxiliary power plug being stuffed up between the IO stacks and the CPU keep out zone again, there's just not enough room to put it anywhere else), and the horizontal Mini PCI-E slot (A lot of other boards use a vertical slot to save space).Until somebody figures out how to get 4 memory slots onto a consumer oriented Mini ITX board (I've seen a couple of server boards with 4 SODIMM slots, but nothing consumer grade, and definitely nothing with full size DIMM slots), we'll all have to make due with 2 memory slots, and that's mostly OK...Build Quality:Overall build quality is good, though I've been spoiled by Gigabyte's super chunky PCBs. This one doesn't feel as substantial as my Gigabyte Mini ITX boards, but it's not in any danger of breaking or flexing too much under normal use. The board looks nice as well. The black, blue and chrome looks classy and not overly busy.The small heatsinks on the VRMs and chipset seem to do a good job at managing heat- though I don't overclock.Experience:The UEFI interface is pretty nice - a little cleaner than some of the ASUS and Gigabyte boards I've used lately, and miles ahead of MSI. I miss having dual BIOS chips though, I'm always nervous about a bad flash when there's no on-board backup...The drivers and accessory applications are pretty ho-hum. The system management software is definitely not as full featured as ASUS, but it's not bad at all - shows you detailed system information on clocks and voltages, and allows you to make a lot of adjustments on the fly within Windows.I'm a little disappointed in the inclusion of a Broadcom wireless NIC. The card itself seems just fine, but I've just never had good luck with Broadcom NICs in Windows. They're fine in UNIX or GNU\Linux for the most part, but in Windows, there's not much better than a decent Intel wireless NIC for reliability and compatibility. Again, this is a minor quibble, and is easily solved with about $33 right now.I haven't done any testing of the HDMI-In connector, but it's an intriguing feature nonetheless... I hope to be able to test the M.2 slot performance some time soon (no M.2 drive right now).Unless a competitor I like better (Gigabyte, or maybe ASUS) comes out with a similarly spec'd Mini ITX board at a similar price, there's nothing even close to as good as this board in my mind.

Mine managed to make it not even 2 years and the onboard ethernet adapter has taken the boat to dump island. I started to notice odd behavior upon various reboots and now it has become a solid state of affairs. My download rates all are over the map and my uploads are consistently 10% of my downloads. I have new gigabit service from ATT. I have several machines and this is the only one that exhibits the behavior. I have thrown in a new drive with a fresh install of Windows 10. Same behavior. Even went as far as another third drive with Ubuntu on it. Same thing. It is utterly odd. If I instead us a USB 3.0 ethernet adapter the issue is not present. Since there is only the single PCI-E slot I am stuck with either using a USB adapter or having to ditch the board. Plain sucks.

Great motherboard. No problem OCing my i7 to 4.6 @ 1.23v.

Good construction and quality parts.Very slow data rate on hard drives. I'm using SATA Flash drives in RAID 5 and the transfer speeds do not go above 45MBps.Not all of the SATA ports can be used at the same time. This is misleading and not clear in their advertising. It says this in the tech specs on their website, but it's not obvious.

This is my first ASRock board. Well second, if you count the first Z97E-ITX/AC that arrived and failed to POST. Since I bought it on Amazon,the RMA process was a breeze, and it only took two days for me to get a replacement. The second Z97-EITX/AC POSTed like a champ. Working with this board, I appreciated the gold plated contacts inside each of the the DIMM slots, but more attention could have been put on the IO shields. The Wifi antenna looks really nice and provides me with great signal strength. It comes with a one-time use sticky pad so you can hang it just about anywhere. It's functional and works, but I think a magnet or an option to wall mount the antenna would have been more useful.I love the 12K capacitors ASRock uses on these motherboards. What a great touch. I remember years ago Dell had a nasty problem with bad capacitors in their Optiplex 755 line. So anytime I see manufacturers talk about the types of capacitors they use, I definitely pay attention. The extra attention placed on the PCB construction and the efficient power delivery system wasn't lost on me either. To make the best of an already awesome power delivery system I decided to power this board using a Seasonic 80+ Platinum fanless 520 watt power supply unit.With a clean source of 520 watts and single +12v rail rated for 42 Amps I'm running an i7-4790K (4.0Ghz Haswell-Refresh) chilled by a Corsair H100i AIO Water cooler, 16GB (8Gb x 2) DDR3 at 1600 Mhz, and a EVGA GeForce GTX 770 SuperClocked 2GB graphics card. Originally I ordered an MSI Radeon R9 280X Twin Frozr Gaming OC 3GB video card, but I wasn't able to get it to work with this board without getting severe screen flickering in 2D and 3D applications. The EVGA with Nvidia's GTX 770 GPU is just phenomenal. I also tossed in a Blu-Ray player into the mix just for the heck of it. Stress tested my machine for 72-hours and she passed with flying colors. Audio is fantastic. The amount of USB ports (and headers) is great. Could have used more fan headers, but I was able to make it work using a few Y adapters. The software needs work, but overall ASRock released a great product.*** 2017 Update: Motherboard Dies at 2 Year Mark ***Up until last week, this board has been very reliable. System was running fine and was connected to an APC UPS. The computer was on, but sitting idle, when it suddenly it powered off, and wouldn't power back on. No other devices connected to the APC UPS went offline. The PSU tested fine. The RAM also fine. I checked Asrock warranty and the board is covered for one year. I will not be buying a third Asrock board. I have decided to go back with Asus, because their reliability in my experience is better and they come with a 3 yr warranty.

Great little board. The M2 port under the board works great with my SSD drive. So far no issues with the wifi as some others have stated.

Habe das Board in meinem Gaming Rechner verbaut und reicht wenn man keine großen Erweiterungskarten benötigt, alles was man braucht fürs Gaming! Empfehle als Gehäuse definitiv das CoolerMaster Elite 130, um die kompakte Größe mit einer potenten Grafikkarte zu kombinieren!

Du très bon travail d'ASRock comme d'habitude : bonne qualité de fabrication, accessoires satisfaisants, excellentes possibilités d'extension, bonnes option de personnalisation offerte par le BIOS.On notera en particulier ce qu'elle offre en plus de ses concurrents sur le plan logiciel (des options qui me sont chères) : option de réveil de l'ordinateur par USB (ce qui permet d'allumer l'ordinateur avec la pression d'une touche de clavier, d'un clic de souris ou d'un bouton de télécommande IR), bonnes possibilités de gestion des ventilateurs (bien meilleur que ce que la concurrence propose).Côté matériel, la carte présente le grand avantage d'offrir 6 ports SATA (et non 5 comme chez Gigabyte ou Asus), ce qui m'a permis de lui connecter 1 lecteur BluRay, 1 SSD ainsi que 4 HDD. La carte mère vient par ailleurs équipée d'une puce WiFi et d'une carte son de bonne facture pour une solution intégrée (ALC1150). Ce dernier point ne la distingue pas vraiment des autres cartes mini-ITX équipées du chipset Z97 mais en fait néanmoins un excellent candidat à une utilisation pour un HTPC.

Pretty stable and it has 6 SATA ports - good for NAS box builds. Pair it with a dual gig NIC and you can enjoy around 87MB/s data transfer speeds.

Nulla da dire, tutto perfetto, spedizione veloce e servizio cortese.La scheda va bene, nessun problema, ho dovuto però scaricare i driver per la LAN che altrimenti non andava (per fortuna c'è il wifi integrato). Permette di settare l'overclock con facilità, il bios è chiaro e ricco di possibilità. Boot molto veloce (5-6 secondi e sei già in desktop windows 8.1).

compare a mon autre pc sur une z97i plus asuslegerement plus rapide en wifiantenne wifi qui capte mieumoin jolieles logiciel sont bcp moin beau et un peu plus compliquele port m.2 est pour les plus petite barrette