A tiny Ivy Bridge board with all the features you could need
Written By
Published on 28 October 2012
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1 / 4
Our rating
Reviewed price £93 inc VAT
The GA-Z77N-WiFi is a Mini-ITX motherboard with a packed specification – perfect if you want to build a tiny PC but don’t want to scrimp on features.
It’s a socket LGA1155 motherboard, so works with both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors, but if you’re spending money on an up-to-date Z77 Express chipset you should really be buying one of Intel’s latest chips. The rear of the motherboard has four USB and two USB3 ports, and there’s a USB3 header on the motherboard, so you can either connect up the front panel USB3 ports in a compatible case or use a bracket to add USB3 ports to the rear.
You also get two HDMI and a DVI output to take advantage of Ivy Bridge processors’ integrated graphics, but you can only run two monitors at once. If you want a three-monitor setup, or if you just want to play games at higher resolutions, you’ll need to plug a graphics card into the spare PCI Express x16 slot.
There’s not much room on the tiny 170x170mm board’s surface for expansion slots; the PCI Express x16 slot is all you get. You shouldn’t need to fit much in the way of expansion cards, though, as the board has pretty much everything you need built-in. There’s 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Intel’s WiDi wireless display technology, and the sound chipset gives you an optical S/PDIF output and 7.1 surround sound. The two memory slots let you have a maximum of 16GB of RAM, which is enough for any home application we can think of, and you’re well served for storage, with two SATAIII ports (for SSDs) and two SATAII (for hard disks and optical drives) and support for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10.
The board performed as we expected in our benchmarks. When we fitted an Intel Core i7-3770K processor we saw an overall score of 113, which is what we’d expect from this processor. Graphics performance, whether from the processor’s integrated graphics or our reference AMD Radeon HD 5770 graphics card, was also what we’d expect.
We had some luck overclocking the processor. It’s not possible to raise the processor voltage, but by raising the processor multiplier to 42 from the standard 38 we saw the processor’s clock speed increase to 4.2GHz and our benchmarks to 125.
It’s an expensive board, but there’s no doubt the GA-Z77N-WiFi has the performance and specification to match its price. If you want to build a tiny PC but don’t want to scrimp on features, it’s a great buy.
Written by
Chris Finnamore
Chris has been writing about technology for over ten years. He split his time between ExpertReviews.co.uk and Computer Shopper magazine, while obsessing over Windows Phone, Linux and obscure remakes of old games, and trying to defend Windows 8 from its many detractors
