Costing £184 inc VAT, the Asus ROG Strix Z270i Gaming is the priciest Z270 mini-ITX board available.
It’s also the only mini-ITX Z270 board with two M.2 ports, opening up RAID with ultra-fast NVMe SSDs in RAID, or the ability to use one NVMe drive as your boot drive and a larger, cheaper SATA M.2 SSD for data, negating the need for additional drive mounts. What’s more, Asus has included a nifty-looking heatsink for the top-side M.2 port, complete with a thermal pad. The other M.2 port is located on the underside of the PCB.
The Asus doesn’t have as many SATA ports as some of the other boards on test; the Gigabyte Z270N-WiFi and both ASRock boards all sport six ports compared to the Asus board’s four, although the Asus is clearly aimed at people who want to take advantage of next-generation storage, rather than hard disks and SATA SSDs, and you’re unlikely to install more than four SATA drives in a mini- ITX rig anyway. The Asus also sports huge heatsinks for both sides of the CPU power circuitry, which comprises eight phases.
This story is from the May 2017 edition of Custom PC.
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This story is from the May 2017 edition of Custom PC.
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