Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsIncredible small and powerful package
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 June 2020
This motherboard was a pleasure to install and very straightforward. It offers connections for all front connections including USBC headers, and fits most mini itx cases that don't do the sandwich thing (without pcie risers).
The board is very high quality and with a nice finish although I found some metallic dust that I had to wipe away.
Very good layout for all the connections, and very good VRMs. On the back of the board, you get an easy access to reset your bios which came in handy when overclocking my ram (managed to get my RAM from 3600 CL18 to 3733 CL 16). No wasted connections in the back, I find PS2 and HDMI ports superfluous given CPUs with no APUs will always be run here, this board just gives you USBC and USB3. WiFi 6 is superb, so fast, and that audio quality is fantastic. The sodimm daughterboard is neat and works very well. The attention to detail is really apparent here, and this allowed me to build up a true gaming Beast that fits under my desk.
The board automatically overclocks things for you, and the only thing I don't like is if you do manual CPU overclocking you lose the speed switching and there's no explanation of all the different overclocking options available. I started toying with them but I didn't want a fixed CPU speed and preferred letting the system change speed on its own.
I'm blown away by the gaming performance, the system is totally stable and amazingly quick.
It is the most expensive board in this form factor, but I am really pleased with all the features, the WiFi and Audio chips here are outstanding and the rest of the system will support one more generation of cpu upgrades and the next generation of pcie 4 devices. I wish the more complex overclocking features could be leveraged in a wizard (sorry pros) but I got my small overclock in and this is a wonderful stable and high performance platform for a small form factor gaming machine and I'm very impressed. Highly recommend it.