X99 on mITX: ASRock X99E-itx/ac

Indeed not that limited, too bad Asetek choose to include a very specific bracket (or atleast so they say) while the Asetek bracket would have had the most support. Oh well, I'm just glad people aren't limited too much by cooling choices, with enough momentum we might see more brands pick this up.

It must be inspiring to see those 12 and 18-core monster builds on an mITX platform that fits in a shoebox.
 
Does the included bracket work with the square block version of the H100i then?
 
For H100i you need rubber or something to stick on H100i CPU side.
I use four 3mm(thickness) x 3mm x 40mm with 3mm x 40 mm dual-side sticker on H100i CPU side.
Just put those rubbers on the edge of H100i CPU side.
Then H100i can perfect fit bracket.

Two thing to know.
1. H100i's tube must be rearIO side or CPU power side.
2. And there is noway to use Corsair Link.
 
Just got mine for the NCASE M1

d5rDqzY.jpg


e9SlSca.jpg


:D cant wait!
 
can this be cooled with a Noctua NH-L12? or will it just melt in and of itself?
 
It will work, but I doubt it would be quiet when stressed. When stressed with AIDA64, it needed about 1200rpm on the fan to keep my i5-4670K (with default clocks) just below 60°C. It could ofcourse be adjusted towards a 75°C point since stress-testing is rarely a general use scenario. The biggest problem is the mass of the heatsink or lack thereof. I think 140W CPU's are only going to show this even more.

If you already have the cooler, it's worth trying before you buy a new one.
 
caycep said:
can this be cooled with a Noctua NH-L12? or will it just melt in and of itself?
Click to expand...

It can do it, when running synthetic tests it will got hot and loud but under normal use it should be fine.

I'm running the L9x65 on a 5930K with a 92x25mm fan and under Prime it doesn't do very well but then when I run some lighter 3d renders that puts all cores at ~60% load it stays pretty quiet actually.
 
Thanks for the tip with the separators, and nice channel, DfknG. Quite helpful to those of us considering liquid-cooling this thing. In the Linus TT video, they used an H80i with a random screw, which doesn't really help someone trying to replicate the process. This is going to be quite a build!

A question for you: what led you to this mobo? Did you just want to see how much power you could fit into mini-itx for fun, or did you have a specific set of needs?

I also have an M1 with an old H100i and am considering upgrading my mobo/cpu/memory (currently on Z77), but I'm on the fence as to whether to go Z97 or X99. A personal choice, yes, but difficult, especially now that this board is proven and DDR4 prices are coming down a bit. If they update the BIOS to support M.2 NVME drives, that might push me over the edge, despite the cost.
 
inchikiboze said:
Thanks for the tip with the separators, and nice channel, DfknG. Quite helpful to those of us considering liquid-cooling this thing. In the Linus TT video, they used an H80i with a random screw, which doesn't really help someone trying to replicate the process. This is going to be quite a build!

A question for you: what led you to this mobo? Did you just want to see how much power you could fit into mini-itx for fun, or did you have a specific set of needs?

I also have an M1 with an old H100i and am considering upgrading my mobo/cpu/memory (currently on Z77), but I'm on the fence as to whether to go Z97 or X99. A personal choice, yes, but difficult, especially now that this board is proven and DDR4 prices are coming down a bit. If they update the BIOS to support M.2 NVME drives, that might push me over the edge, despite the cost.
Click to expand...

Ah look,
It was always a projects and it wont get used to its full potential and isnt the most financially recommended but...
Originally I wanted a Shuttle X79 board which was custom, it was DTX and I was going to mod it to fit, only when I exhausted all options and couldn't locate one did I give in and go Z97, so I always wanted to it be 'extreme series' so when I heard the ASRock board was coming it was an absolute no brainer.
I actually have a video where I just talk about the board a little bit and share some other views, it will be up shortly.

On the NVMe, I have the Samsung SM951 which comes in NVMe and AHCI, I have the ACHI version and i'll just leave this here...

mnluSOJ.png
 
Phuncz said:
It will work, but I doubt it would be quiet when stressed. When stressed with AIDA64, it needed about 1200rpm on the fan to keep my i5-4670K (with default clocks) just below 60°C. It could ofcourse be adjusted towards a 75°C point since stress-testing is rarely a general use scenario. The biggest problem is the mass of the heatsink or lack thereof. I think 140W CPU's are only going to show this even more.

If you already have the cooler, it's worth trying before you buy a new one.
Click to expand...

The 5820 and 59x0 series run cooler than all 4xxxk series.


Techpowerup.com
 
Ah this is news for me. It must be the better heatspreader setup with solder instead of goop that accounts for the better temps. But still, Haswell-E will produce more heat so you'll still need a capable cooler that's meant for 140W TDP.

Noctua also says this:

Caution: The NH-L12 is a low-profile quiet cooler designed for use in small form factor cases and HTPC environments. While it provides first rate performance in its class, it is not suitable for overclocking and should be used with care on CPUs with more than 95W TDP (Thermal Design Power).
Click to expand...

And:

*Caution: Intel's unlocked -K series CPUs dissipate more heat than the indicated TDP with most mainboards' default BIOS settings. For this reason, our recommendation does not include -K series CPUs unless the heat dissipation is limited to the indicated TDP by choosing appropriate BIOS settings.
Click to expand...

So my advice still stands: the NH-L12 might work, test it out first, but keep in mind it might not be enough.

And I'd like to add that it will be very dependant on case cooling. In the Ncase M1 with a high-end GPU, your options are limited. I have my GPU set up with a large heatsink and two 120mm fans wedged between the bottom of the case and the heatsink, leaving no way for air to choose another path than the one I want. The bottom fans exhaust out the bottom and the fans on the side-bracket are intakes with one dedicated for the CPU. This means air is coming in through the sidepanel, first hitting the CPU, then joining the 2nd fan on the bracket, going towards the GPU and coming out of the case at the bottom.

This gives me the best temps for both heatsources in the Ncase.

LmrT0Uk.png
 
Perfection is way over the line but it is effective in the Ncase. And credit should go out to Cowsgomoo for convincing me on this setup.
 
DfknG said:
I always wanted to it be 'extreme series' so when I heard the ASRock board was coming it was an absolute no brainer.

I actually have a video where I just talk about the board a little bit and share some other views, it will be up shortly.

On the NVMe, I have the Samsung SM951 which comes in NVMe and AHCI, I have the ACHI version and i'll just leave this here...
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply, DfknG. Wow, this thing is a monster! One of the most interesting builds on the forum at the moment, IMHO. Please keep us updated or post a YouTube video on your channel when you've had some time to break it in. I for one would be very curious to see temperatures and noise levels. I'm sure the benchmarks will be great.

I'm tempted to do a similar build, but I'd just like to be more sure about cooling it efficiently and fairly quietly with the H100i or another AIO cooler, with a decent OC up to 4 GHz or so. I only ever use one graphics card, and at least at the moment, the benefits of quad-channel over dual channel memory setups don't seem to be huge for my workloads, so if I could have X99 in a little portable rig for editing and rendering on the go, that would be something. Thanks again, and good luck!
 
inchikiboze said:
Thanks for the reply, DfknG. Wow, this thing is a monster! One of the most interesting builds on the forum at the moment, IMHO. Please keep us updated or post a YouTube video on your channel when you've had some time to break it in. I for one would be very curious to see temperatures and noise levels. I'm sure the benchmarks will be great.

I'm tempted to do a similar build, but I'd just like to be more sure about cooling it efficiently and fairly quietly with the H100i or another AIO cooler, with a decent OC up to 4 GHz or so. I only ever use one graphics card, and at least at the moment, the benefits of quad-channel over dual channel memory setups don't seem to be huge for my workloads, so if I could have X99 in a little portable rig for editing and rendering on the go, that would be something. Thanks again, and good luck!
Click to expand...

No sweat, i see you've been posting some comments? I'll be sure to do my best to oblige.

As stated above my 5820k temps are behaving the same as my delidded 4790k. The 4790k @ 1.3v and 4.9ghz was peaking in the low to mid 70degrees with the H100i.

The 5820k is @ 1.3v and 4.4ghz on all 6 cores and is peaking at 70degrees top. I have no hesitation in throwing a GPU in the mix but will be expanding the loop with a 2nd radiator.
 
I recently built a system using this board. It's fast. Really fast. I went with an E5-2680 V3 and 2x 16GB of Samsung memory. I was originally going to go with a 1TB EVO as the OS drive but the SM951 was too tempting to pass up so I added that as the OS drive and I'm using the EVO as storage now.

I'm using the Corsair H100i GTX and the bracket from Asetek for CPU cooling.
I'm seeing idle temps in the 35-40 range for the CPU. I'm still waiting on a permanent video card (had to RMA the first one, it let out the magic smoke and my heart skipped several beats as a result). The video card was an MSI GTX 970 (nothing fancy but it will work for now).

I went with a Corsair AX760i for the PSU. The whole thing is housed in a Corsair 380T case. It's a bit more bulky than most of the builds I've seen on here but it will work great for what I need it for.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with it... though not with that video card at the moment.

I've been lurking and reading this forum for a couple of weeks now and all of the information you folks have posted was of great help and I wouldn't have been able to build my lovely beast without it. I really just wanted to pop in and say thank you, particularly to those of you who were commenting about the cooling solutions and found the Asetek bracket. Thanks!
 
nick fury said:
I recently built a system using this board. It's fast. Really fast. I went with an E5-2680 V3 and 2x 16GB of Samsung memory. I was originally going to go with a 1TB EVO as the OS drive but the SM951 was too tempting to pass up so I added that as the OS drive and I'm using the EVO as storage now.

I'm using the Corsair H100i GTX and the bracket from Asetek for CPU cooling.
I'm seeing idle temps in the 35-40 range for the CPU. I'm still waiting on a permanent video card (had to RMA the first one, it let out the magic smoke and my heart skipped several beats as a result). The video card was an MSI GTX 970 (nothing fancy but it will work for now).

I went with a Corsair AX760i for the PSU. The whole thing is housed in a Corsair 380T case. It's a bit more bulky than most of the builds I've seen on here but it will work great for what I need it for.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with it... though not with that video card at the moment.

I've been lurking and reading this forum for a couple of weeks now and all of the information you folks have posted was of great help and I wouldn't have been able to build my lovely beast without it. I really just wanted to pop in and say thank you, particularly to those of you who were commenting about the cooling solutions and found the Asetek bracket. Thanks!
Click to expand...
Cool! Congratulations on your build! :D

Oh! The Samsung RAM is ECC right? Do you know if anyone makes non-ECC 16GB sticks?
 
nick fury, thanks for posting about your build, which sounds killer. Congrats! Two questions:

1) how is the noise, particularly at idle? Is it fairly quiet? Are you using the stock fans on the H100i (which I've found to be a bit noisy), or did you switch them out?

2) What made you go with this particular build? Did you need a tiny or mobile editing rig? Why pair the 12-core Xeon with a consumer 970 instead of a Quadro or Firepro?
 
@inchikiboze

Happy to answer. The noise is more than tolerable for me. I'm about 2 feet away from it at the moment and about 13ft from my refrigerator and I hear the refrigerator over it. The system it is replacing was VERY loud. I don't have a way to measure the noise but the loudest thing on it by far is this fan: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009XERK6G?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00

I am using the stock fans with the H100i GTX at the moment.

I needed portable CPU power. The GPU doesn't matter too much to me at the moment. It will likely be replaced with something more high end down the road. As will the rest of the system at some point and become less portable. My hope is to eventually make it into a dual processor system via upgrades but that is a year or two away.

I need it to be portable because it will spend a decent amount of time traveling between home and the school I mentor/volunteer for (Teaching high school students about how to build competitive robots. Yeah, it's as cool as it sounds.). It will have a couple of different 3D design suites installed (SolidWorks and Autodesk). Granted, I don't need the CPUs for those. They can run just fine on lesser systems. Being able to render out in high detail at a faster rate will be nice though. That's just why I need it to be portable. It has to pull double duty.

I need the CPUs for running a decent number of virtual machines. This machine will also double as my lab for running a lot of the latest and greatest from VMware/RedHat/Microsoft and others. I work in IT and I need a system to do development work on. The plethora of cores is already making life so much better than the Core 2 Duo system this is replacing.
 
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nick fury, many thanks for the informative reply. I see where the portability and features really do fit your use case well, and thanks for commenting on the sound. It's good to hear that you haven't found the noise intolerable. Core 2 Duo to 12-core Xeon is a big jump!

In my case, I would probably pair this board with a 5820K, possibly a 5960X, as my CPU needs are more modest than yours, but with the OC pushing the H100i fans harder, I'd probably switch out the stock fans for something else. I travel quite a bit, but would like to have more power for Adobe CC, encoding, the occasional VM, and the extra PCIe lanes would be nice for gaming and storage.

By the way, your mentoring gig sounds awesome. Wish we'd had a robotics program when I was in high school!

Anyway, thanks again. Several news outlets ridiculed this board and the whole concept of X99 in mini-itx when it was announced, but I think there is more evidence accruing here on this thread that you can do some amazing things with the combo, provided you have specific needs.
 
inchikiboze said:
Anyway, thanks again. Several news outlets ridiculed this board and the whole concept of X99 in mini-itx when it was announced, but I think there is more evidence accruing here on this thread that you can do some amazing things with the combo, provided you have specific needs.
Click to expand...

I agree completely. It's an odd duck for a board but I really like it. I'm impressed so far. Just waiting on Newegg to finish processing my RMA right now.
 
Mind sharing what memory you used? One of the things holding me back from getting this board was the (current) 16GB memory limit using consumer CPUs.
 
Does anyone that own this board have ESXi running on it? I'm thinking I might try setting up an all-in-one multi-OS system using device passthrough, and I was hoping someone could take a screenshot of the available passthrough device screen. Specifically, I'm wondering about onboard USB controller passthrough, since that's been so hit and miss for me in the past with other motherboards.
 
EdZ said:
Actually, that is special. Those are RDIMMS (Registered DIMMs) which have not previously confirmed as being compatible with the X99E-ITX/AC. These will only work with a Xeon,regular Core-series CPUs are not compatible with ECC and/or RDIMMs.
Click to expand...

Depends. You can usually get away with using unbuffered/non-registered ECC ram with a regular CPU and consumer chipset, it just won't activate the ECC bits and run as standard memory modules. Server boards essentially have additional traces to the DIMM slots for ECC functionality. It's not something that's ever officially supported or stated however, so you are absolutely on your own with respect to this.

Registered/Buffered ram (RDIMMs) definitely won't work unless it's an ECC enabled cpu like a Xeon, and even then, you have to be careful the motherboard/chipset supports it as well. If they happen to be Crucial sticks, you'd want to use their website compatibility list, possibly reach out to them, and your board manufacturer, if you don't see it explicitly stated in their documentation/manual/memory QVL that it will work.
 
Ok been running this board for a while.

One gripe I have is this.

The fan header behind the PCIE slot. Because its X99, you will always have a GPU populated. If you have a fan on that header, the GPU PCB basically crushes it in there.

Removing a GPU from the NCASE which doesnt really fit to try get at a fan header took WAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY longer than it should ever have.

The offender.
iMGTiCs.jpg
 
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DfknG said:
Ok been running this board for a while.

Once gripe I have is this.

the fan header behind the PCIE slot. Because its X99, you will always have a GPU populated. If you have a fan on that header, the GPU PCB basically crushes it in there.

removing a GPU from the NCASE which doesnt really fit to try get at a fan header took WAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY longer than it should ever have.

The offender.
http://i.imgur.com/iMGTiCs.jpg
Click to expand...

There are two other fan headers on this board, why couldn't you split one of those?
 
iFreilicht said:
There are two other fan headers on this board, why couldn't you split one of those?
Click to expand...

well you could of course, by why put something in that is near unusable?

As i'll be running 4 fans plus the pump ill have to split it somewhere anyway, I just thought worth mentioning.
 
Yeah this is indeed something to keep in mind, thanks for letting us know !
 
i, and going by asrocks forum a lot of other users have also had issues with the wifi card where it would suddenly stop responding, changing it out with an intel card fixed the issue
 
I've had the same issue with my Z87E-ITX and I've seen it too on the Z97E-ITX/ac thread.
As soon as I learned the Asus Maximus VII Impact has the same AzureWave crap card, I ordered an Intel 7260-AC to replace it.
 
Has anyone tried any NVMe SSDs in the M.2 slot (be it Samsung or Intel)? Wanted to make sure it's bootable prior to ordering one myself. ASRock says they support the Intel 750, but I'm not sure if that's the PCIe or 2.5" one since I can't find any UEFI options regarding the M.2 slot pertaining to it.

Also, for those looking at dual GPU options, this is one of the very few consumer boards that I'm aware of that supports PCIe bifurcation. Lian Li's PC-O5 would enable that using say two of the short depth Asus GTX 970s. Possible with a number of other 3 slot chassis like the NCASE M1 if you're utilizing water cooling too.
 
Blue Fox said:
Has anyone tried any NVMe SSDs in the M.2 slot (be it Samsung or Intel)? Wanted to make sure it's bootable prior to ordering one myself. ASRock says they support the Intel 750, but I'm not sure if that's the PCIe or 2.5" one since I can't find any UEFI options regarding the M.2 slot pertaining to it.

Also, for those looking at dual GPU options, this is one of the very few consumer boards that I'm aware of that supports PCIe bifurcation. Lian Li's PC-O5 would enable that using say two of the short depth Asus GTX 970s. Possible with a number of other 3 slot chassis like the NCASE M1 if you're utilizing water cooling too.
Click to expand...

I use the Samsung SM951 as a boot drive and it has been rock solid so far.

Also, if you're considering dual GPUs, make sure there will be enough PCIe channels -- the M.2 slot uses some of them.
 
Are you sure you have the NVMe one? Most of the SM951s are AHCI.

As for dual GPUs, while I'm not going to be using them, bifurcation doesn't use extra lanes since you'd still be connecting to a single PCIe x16 slot, not to mention there are plenty to go around. Only 20 are used from the CPU (which supports either 28 or 40) as the X99 PCH handles the rest (of which only 6 of 8 are used so far as I can count).
 
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