EVGA Z87 Stinger?

Anyone using the EVGA Z87 Stinger ITX board? Are EVGA boards still terrible?

Looking at the Hadron Air for a new build, but it looks like the best board to use with it is the Stinger. The Hadron has a raised area that sits exactly under the CPU socket of the Stinger.

The board is a big let-down, as with most of their things post-Sapphire exodus.

Details?

That's weird, I thought the consensus was that [it was] a great OC ITX board. The problem I heard was that it competes with the Impact VI, which has far more features packed into the same sort of price.

The Z77 Stinger was plagued with firmware issues from launch, not sure if they were ever resolved (probably were).

To be fair, I haven't owned any of these 3 boards.

Yeah, the reason I created this thread is that the Z87 Stinger looks like a nice board, BUT I do remember how crappy the Z77 Stinger was.

There isn't a large thread devoted to the Z87 Stinger like there is for the ASRock or ASUS ITX boards so I guess many others are staying away from the Z87 Stinger too.

I considered the Asus Impact, but I see alot of posts w/ people complaining about popping noises with the audio on that board.

Yeah, I almost made the jump to from a Z77E-ITX to an Impact VI, but then I heard about the M.2 connector only having ~500MB/s bandwidth (silly considering the specs of the new drives), and the audio popping (even with the newest circa 2014 bios update).

The Z87 is a nice board from everything I've heard, just hard to swallow the price. Enthusiast hardware is enthusiast priced though.

What are you running atm?

I'm using a laptop right now, but contemplating a Haswell build. Not sure what board to go with.

With the Z87E-ITX, you play the C1/C2 lottery. I still see posts from people who purchased one recently and got a C1. Also, (stupid reason) I don't like having a DVI port on the backplane when I can have extra USB ports instead.

With the Impact, you get questionable audio quality and a crippled M.2 connector (limited bandwidth).

With the Stinger, you get questionable quality period and who knows if EVGA's programmers know how to make a decent BIOS / UEFI yet.

If your laptop is getting you by/keeping you happy, I would wait for Broadwell-D to hit market. Some speculation that DDR4 is going to be there (maybe only for servers at first), 1GB/s M.2 connectors. The new processors will be pin-compatible with 1150, but will require a 9-series chipset to function.

The current high end (Z87) desktop boards are between generations imo. Same PCIE revision, marginally better CPU performance, same DDR3, crippled M.2. That's why I haven't budged from Ivy yet.

E: If you're going to build an ITX Haswell rig, I would probably recommend the Impact VI. If the popping audio is a deal-breaker, consider using optical, or get an outboard USB DAC/Amp. Pretty sure you're aware of the optical thing, saw you posted in the thread where I read that.

Z87 doesn't cripple M.2, Asus did with their PCIe 2.0 x1 bandwidth.
M.2 allows up to PCIe 3.0 x4 bandwidth which would allow 4GB/s roughly at maximum dedicated lanes. This would require the sacrifice of some other lanes but it's possible, none the less.

But I can support the idea of waiting for the 9-series chipset if you aren't in a hurry, DDR4 is right around the corner and SATA Express / NVMe may be a part of the new chipset too.

Even with DDR4 around the corner, I'm not ready to buy all new stuff. I do have some components laying around (2x 8GB sticks of RAM, SSDs, and some other parts). Looks like the latest Realtek drivers have fixed the audio popping issue with the Impact. Does the NGFF slot on the Impact run at least as fast as SATA3?

I was curious about this myself after you asked. I knew that the Impact VI wouldn't be able to fully utilize an M.2 drive, but wasn't sure how it's performance actually compared to a high-end SATA3 drive.

Found a mini review which includes a MyDigitalSSD 128GB M.2 on the Impact VI, and here's an 840 Pro for comparison. Real-world differences aside, whatever they may be, synthetics favour the SATA3.

Yeah, the M.2 slot on the Asus boards is actually not better than (m)SATA on the other boards. Considering most drives are designed with the SATA 600 specs in mind, I'd suggest getting a decent SATA or mSATA one for the time being, M.2 will probably need a while to really be the hands-down best choice, slot-wise and SSD-wise.