Gadgetory

what's up and welcome to hardware unboxed I'm your host Matt and today we've got the privilege of looking at a very special motherboard we've got as rocks x99 e ITX AC as rocks x99 e ITX AC is their first ever motherboard to use the x99 chipset on the mini-itx platform which makes this product pretty unique and special this is something you would've thought was impossible not too long ago but as rocks really pulled it off the made it works so well in fact that you get to look forward to premium features like wireless AC USB 3.1 SATA Express and m2 support the only real trade-off of having the LGA 2011 socket on the Mini ITX form factor is that you're limited just two sticks of RAM which rules out the quad channel feature of the LGA 2011 version three processors but is it really a significant trade-off in the real world I'm going to investigate and find out a little later but for now let's pull it out of the box and see how as rockers crammed all these features onto such a tiny board so we've got a set of instruction manuals first one software second one is the quick installation guide which is plenty thick good accustomed liquid cooling mounting bracket standard i/o panel the USB to USB 3 adapter in case your case only supports USB 2 at the front with the Wi-Fi antenna and Bluetooth antenna longer than extension cables your PCI Express wireless a SD card and the mounting bracket for it with just two SATA cables even though the board supports more in this box is the bundled CPU cooler let me finally get to the board itself alrighty so let's take a look down the i/o panel so starting on the right we've got your five audio jacks and optical output just next to that we've got the two USB 3.1 ports we've got four USB 3 ports and to give it LAN ports we've got your Eastsider next to that CMOS reset 2 USB 2 slots and a ps2 legacy port we've got four ninety degrees mounted Saida ports in the bottom right corner alongside the PCI Express x 16 port just underneath the CPU is the m2 slot that can take cards up to 80 mm or like this one as space is tired on the mini ITX platform as rockers opted to use in the narrow ilm LGA 2011 - three socket means slightly longer much thinner than the standard square socket you've also got the option of water cooling with coolness is sold in 120 V + or 120 V closed-loop CPU liquid coolers for those that don't want to shower out for an aftermarket cooler as rocks got you covered with the previously mentioned Dinah Tron one would air cooler so this is how it sits on the board for installation the fan needs to be removed and all four screws need to be secured to the board the two ddr4 dimm slots are pretty snug against the CPU socket here but you can still fit large memory modules like the HyperX predator the one concern we have with this board was that only supports dual channel memory and this could hurt performance as the f99 platform is meant to run a quad channel memory yet despite enormous 40% drop in memory damage when compared to quad channel boards this allows rock wasn't any slower at all and the core i7 59 60 X delivered virtually the same results with dual channel memory as a dude quad channel we tried a number of application and encouraging benchmarks and found absolutely no difference at all obviously the same is true in gaming the bundled CPU cooler was quite loud and with a fan turn down the normal levels the 5960 X did get up to about 90 degrees cooling turned out to be pretty much a non-issue as well and it'll be even less of an issue if you choose to go with a liquid cooler features wise you ain't really missing out on anything which is pretty damn impressive for a mini ITX motherboard overall the x99 ATX AC is an amazing achievement by us rock and it truly redefines what's possible on the Mini ITX platform currently retail price instead of 250 US I'm considering the most x99 boards do start at around 200 us this is a pretty unique design with premium pages I'd say it is pretty reasonably priced it's definitely a great option for anyone that does want to build a pretty ridiculous mini ATX system for example here's that build that we used to test the board using the silverstone ft0 one this compact system also has a GTX Titan X installed so it's a seriously powerful mini ITX gaming machine lastly here's how the complete system compares and size to a standard ed 97 ATX motherboard thanks for tuning into Hardware own box we hope you guys liked it as rocks to take on the mini ITX platform if you did hit like he'd subscribe and we'll see you next time yeah