X99 on mITX: ASRock X99E-itx/ac

EdZ said:
I can't think of many situations in which you would have multiple drives storing data where RAID would not be a benefit to reliability.
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RAID itself can be a point of failure. I've seen RAID controllers flake out and corrupt the array.
 
A dedicated RAID controller is generally a bad idea unless you're running an enterprise SAN. You're better off with software RAID, ideally using ZFS or similar filesystem. That makes it very unlikely you will lose an array due to drive failure, boot media failure (use a static image loaded to RAM so you can just slap in another stick with the same image, but anything that can handle the same ZFS level can also import the zpool) or hardware failure elsewhere.
It's not redundant against user error (or catastrophic multi-component failure), but nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool. You still need a backup.
 
I strongly agree that RAID is indeed a good idea, ofcourse realising it is not a backup in itself. But it is redundancy, speed and in some cases like ZFS it also offers other valuable storage benefits like versioning. And you don't need/want a RAID card.
 
Those figures seem kinda disappointing, it seems you only gain 2fps encoding 4k x265 from a 4790 :(
 
Interesting ghetto modding they did on an AMD socket mounting kit. Don't know if the bent arms can survive the tension over a course of time but it's certainly less worrisome than when such modding is done for a large air cooler.
 
phillai said:
Anyone getting this for the NCASE M1? :)
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If I had known this was going to exist I definitely would have waited for this to use in the M1. Unfortunately I did a Z97 build last fall and can't really justify purchasing this now :\
 
phillai said:
Anyone getting this for the NCASE M1? :)
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Very tempted. With Broadwell not looking to be a noticeable improvement worth swapping motherboards for (currently Z77), and Skylake's K series supposedly coming some months after the initial release of socketed Skylake CPUs, X99 is looking pretty good.
 
Even Skylake K is not looking very promising with 4.0GHz quad-core at 95W TDP vs Haswell's 4.0GHz quad-core and 88W TDP. I'm glad I got a board with everything I want and M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4, since an M.2 SSD is the next foreseeable useful upgrade I can think of. It's not like DDR4 offers much more performance and we've only seen X79 vs X99.

If I'd guess, this board with the i7-5820K is a much better upgrade now than anything with i7-6700K and a Z170 chipset in 3 months.
 
Phuncz said:
Even Skylake K is not looking very promising with 4.0GHz quad-core at 95W TDP vs Haswell's 4.0GHz quad-core and 88W TDP. I'm glad I got a board with everything I want and M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4, since an M.2 SSD is the next foreseeable useful upgrade I can think of. It's not like DDR4 offers much more performance and we've only seen X79 vs X99.

If I'd guess, this board with the i7-5820K is a much better upgrade now than anything with i7-6700K and a Z170 chipset in 3 months.
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95W is confirmed?
 
More or less, but keep in mind the likely reason for a higher TDP is a significantly more powerful iGPU.

As I already have an X99-Deluxe, I can't justify swapping to this guy just for a smaller footprint.. especially with the other compromises it brings (specifically cooling on narrow ilm, not so much dual chan DDR4).
 
My biggest issue is that Intel's progress has been on the slow burner for years, Skylake seemed to be promising but in the end it's just another small bump. They can keep selling us marginally improved 5 year old crap with random default voltages since we don't have a better choice. If AMD isn't catching up quickly, this isn't boding well for PC enthusiasts.

low competition -> minimal progress -> less desire to upgrade -> reduced sales -> excuse to blame declining market on buyers instead of lack of progress -> smaller market share manufacturers abandon declining market early -> no competition means no innovation and insane prices

Come on AMD, hit an effing home run.
 
I don't really think that AMD could do anything since they lost their semiconductor factories and have to apply to already existing manufacturing processes that are supported by TSMC and global foundries.

The only real chance AMD has at this point is going deep into the APU and finally supplying those chips with integrated graphics memory or cache (vide intel iris pro vs intel iris performance) which could finally mean proper integrated GPU that could fight with intel on laptop segment if cheaper than pentium + maxwell combo's
 
Why not go with a much cheaper and equally fast SM951 ? They have yet to test the NVMe version which should have increased IOps. It would also not waste so much space and require cables.
 
I still don't understand why ASRock didn't put SO-DIMMs in this board like they did with the server mITX. I know there is hardly any performance loss with dual-channel but then you can tack on more RAM with four slots instead of two.
 
I'd like to note to those who stated that this wouldn't work because the chipset is on the edge of the board
SaperPL said:
My idea was something like this:



I know I'm not a motherboard system engineer and that's just idea of how it could be if wiring the pcb properly with multiple layers would be possible for this config.

It would let you have something like 120mm cooler on the cpu.
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There's now a very close configuration of chipset from Asrock that was posted in other thread

Siba said:
http://www.asrockrack.com/general/news.asp?id=68
EPC612D4I features Intel® Xeon® E5 v3 series with single socket. It supports four DDR4 DIMM slots, four SATA3 ports, and one PCIe3.0x16, fantastic memory frequency and transfer speed for storage. Topped off with two Intel® i210 ports and one dedicated IPMI LAN, this mini-ITX board is well-design with high performance features. It can meet diverse appliances from mini servers for personal users to blade type servers for parallel computing or multiple GPU computing, overall a comprehensive solution for the market.

Key Specification
Mini ITX 6.7" x 6.7"
Socket LGA 2011 R3 Intel® Xeon processor E5-1600/2600 v3 series
Supports Quad channel DDR4 2133/1866 ECC DIMM, 4 x SO-DIMM slots
Support 4 SATA3 by C612
Supports 1 x PCIe 3.0 x16
Integrated IPMI 2.0 with KVM and Dedicated LAN (RTL8211E)
Supports Intel® Dual GLAN ( Intel® i210 + Intel® i217 )

20150430-1.jpg
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Also note that because this is a server board there's additional space taken by onboard GPU and additional ethernet controllers.

It looks like its entirely possible to have x99 itx board with four full lenght dimm slots.
 
SaperPL said:
It looks like its entirely possible to have x99 itx board with four full lenght dimm slots.
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Why go with full length when you they could use SODIMMs?
I think that's the way we should be heading, with constrained space the smaller the components the better.
 
I'm just used to that sodimms were more expensive/slower than standard dimms but maybe you're right - a lot changed since DDR2 era and now DDR3's prices are almost the same.

Anyway with so-dimms it may be possible to have 8 slots for ram
 
I suspect many share your viewpoint and it's why Asrock didn't bother. This board is already in quite the niche, adding SODIMM into the mix could push it further away from prospective buyers. If this does well, we may see a Broadwell-K (or more likely Skylake-K) board that tackles this.

By the way, are these mockups based purely off physical space on the board, or do they take into account the tracing necessary for DDR4 as well? I suspect this was addressed earlier in the thread.
 
While SO-DIMMs were never slower (maybe low-specced ones), they have limitations. Half the number of chips per PCB seems the most obvious (so two SO-DIMM instead of one DIMM is the same) but lets not forget SO-DIMM is 99,99% a laptop-only affair.

These have very specific dimensions so the companies are going to have many angry customers that can't install your memory with its massive dragon-inspired heatsink designs. And we all know that the first thing that you'll find on an enthusiast's mind is dragon-inspired heatsinks. Or so the manufacturers seem to think.
 
Vittra said:
By the way, are these mockups based purely off physical space on the board, or do they take into account the tracing necessary for DDR4 as well? I suspect this was addressed earlier in the thread.
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I've mostly based them on component space on the board but I've tried to take into account what distances were required based on boards that I've already seen. Of course I wasn't doing a checklist or anything like that on each component though.

+1 to what Phuncz said - If I were going to pay for super cool board with ultra high end cpu I'd rather have the ram with nice cooling for it.
 
Too bad it will be almost impossible to do a small mini-itx build with this board that is also silent. Seems to be no good air coolers that fit, and any AIO water cooling that fits will be noisy as well.
 
This might be a dumb question, but is the included antenna required to get wifi on this mobo? Or does it just improve the range/signal etc?
 
Titansfan said:
This might be a dumb question, but is the included antenna required to get wifi on this mobo? Or does it just improve the range/signal etc?
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In my experience with their Z97 itx board, without the antenna attached you will get like 1 bars worth of signal even if the router is in the same room. Antennaless is pretty disgusting
 
Suprfire said:
In my experience with their Z97 itx board, without the antenna attached you will get like 1 bars worth of signal even if the router is in the same room. Antennaless is pretty disgusting
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Yikes :/ alright then. Not a big deal I suppose. Thanks for the heads up!
 
Oh, forgot to mention this for anyone that is interested:

Digital Storm (after some prodding) now has a Bolt 3 configuration with the ASRock x99 Mini Mobo. They managed to get it to work with their 240mm rad (a re-branded h100i it looks like).

Link

Base price is expensive, but you can remove a bunch of stuff to get it down to a more reasonable price. Also has the bonus of being in the beautiful new Lian-Li 05S case, which is hard to get your hands on in the US. :)
 
It seems to still be about $ 2,000 at minimum, for not much interesting stuff. These high-end pre-built PC's never work out cheap when you want to strip it down to the bare essentials.

Good find, nonetheless. It's good to see custom-built PC's already use these.
 
PCs like that are so much "meh" for me I can't even describe it.

I agree with Phuncz, though: Seeing this board used in custom PCs may be very beneficial. If other board manufacturers see that there is a market for mITX X99 boards, we may see other boards like these in the future.
 
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