I actually really appreciate this as well because this kind of information has been hard to come by in the past. I had some questions regarding the included table.
The ASRock B450 Gaming ITX/ac is listed in the table as using the same controller (ISL95712) in "6+2" mode. The spec sheet for ISL95712 states that it is up to a 4+3 controller. The table also doesn't list any doublers. Doesn't this make the board a "big 3+2" rather than a 6+2?
I didn't look at any of the other boards in the table closely, but I was just doing a bunch of reading on the ASRock ITX boards recently and so I was looking very closely at that line in the table.
The ISL95712 maxes out at 4+3 phases, so it can't run in 6+2 as listed in the chart. On the ASRock boards, then run a 3+2 setup but with two sets of MOSFETs and chokes in parallel, but not doubled. There is only one capacitor per phase. It helps keep the temps down by splitting the current, but it's still only a 3 phase design.
Plus, it would be more meaningful if the chart was for similar style boards rather than a smattering of different form factors.In this case, the other m-ITX boards.
Just thinking about POST times, when UEFI was the next big thing we'd been repeatedly promised that it'd allow 1-2s POST times because unlike BIOS it could start components up in parallel instead of 1 at a time.
While current boards do post faster than their predecessors the speedup never came close to meeting the hype. Does anyone know why reality fell so short of the promise?
likely because there is so much crud to siphon through before it completes the process the same from going to post to OS log screen to fully booted OS
am sure there are ways to "speed it up" but often those methods come with chance of something terrible happening and not knowing what took place.
be happy the new stuff is WAY quicker and more energy efficient then the old 9/10 so even if it takes a wee bit longer to boot up, patience come to those whom wait.
SSD helps that much I know, but as far as only 1 to 2s to finish post..umm I personally never heard of such promises, the board I am using is AM3/3+ M5A99X EVO (v1) which uses a UEFI based bios design and just going from HDD to SSD made post much quicker and a few changes I made as well to speed it up also helped.
I personally have more issue with how long it takes to shut down then be fully booted up ^.^
As fun as it sounds there are 10 year old systems that run on UEFI. I must say, that boot times are much quicker on them, while supporting much wider range of hardware. Feature-wise it's hit or miss, I have 9 year old board that's capable of booting from NVMe, thanks to drivers being easy to punch in, but it won't allow user mode to write to boot manager area, thus linux bootloader installation will fail (I just have to point the path manually from the UEFI setup).
Ahmdal's Law, in a way. There is a relative speedup to be had, but desktops don't need to be shutdown/restarted extremely often. Often just letting it go into sleep mode is adequate for me, and leaves my workspace in exactly the same place it was before.
For laptops or other mobile devices, shutting down is more necessary when moving between work environments, (given that sleep mode will drain battery life over time anyways, hibernate isn't ideal and can clog the main storage disk with a file equal in size to your capacity in memory, etc.). For mobile PC devices, I have personally noted that boot times are appreciably fast.
Also, personal anecdote, but I've had boards that when set to options for "fast booting", not only would it refuse to take in DEL or F11 prompts to get into BIOS screen when booting up, but it would go from a stable (normal) bootup, to a blazingly fast crash/reboot cycle for 5 loops before landing me back on the BIOS page with stock settings. This is before and after BIOS updates.
Personal opinion, but I just think it's intentional that for the enthusiast PC market that vendors don't _want_ to speed up boot times because the same users buying these motherboards are enthusiasts likely willing or needing to occasionally go into BIOS and change boot order of disks, or do overclocking features, etc. and making sure users can actually get into BIOS easily and reliably (hence a slow boot with ample time to opt-in to boot to BIOS) may have been one of their intended design goals.
There is reverse effect in action: amount of stuff that is set to initialize during boot is staggering. I'd asku you to find 1MB legacy BIOS, while 16MB UEFI is not uncommon, and I am in a possession of motherboard that has 512 MB SPI flash for it (not 512 megabits - half a gigabyte). Then, amount of stuff you can boot from went trough the roof. On top of drivers for everything that need to start up and register, there are at least three different frameworks that monitor hardware and need to set up. Then, every damn power controller, voltage regulator, thermal zones, OC chips are smart need to boot up too.
Then, amount of memory skyrocketed - if you remember old BIOS happily running memcheck kilobyte after kilobyte, until it reaches that 64MB, and compare to you 64GB system, that still gets a cursory check, despite memory NOT being 1024x faster.
You can cut your boot time down, if you properly disable CSM, disable external controllers (or at least disable their boot rom), properly set up boot sequence to UEFI bootloader, and use GPU with a BIOS that supports GOP, and finally enable fast boot, your PC WILL boot in ~2-3 seconds plus OS.
On the other hand, while handling servers I am accustomed to boot times on the orders of 20 minutes at extreme case.
My system (H87 with NVME boot mod BIOS) gets to windows faster than my 4k DP monitor wakes up from standby. The DVI one is a bit faster. I guess around 3 seconds maybe?
Just about every motherboard out offers a fast boot mode. My 4 year old desktop goes from power button being pushed to windows login screen in 6 seconds. My new laptop is pretty similar, and thats with Dell's bloated UEFI.
Please, on ITX boards, can you conduct testing with a RYZEN 2400G? These are great boards for doing reasonable cost home entertainment and SFF builds with, and that's a solid use case for the 2400G. Testing the SOC VRMs for their comparive ability to support iGPU overclocks on those APUs would be invaluable.
I can see where you are coming from, but our AM4 test bench is designed to test the motherboards on an even playing field with the same hardware. While users might consider the X470GTN as perfect for the 2400G, even I think it's suited, not every board has video outputs to test.
No DisplayPort = instant disqualification. There's no excuse for this any more.
Review sites should just send mobos that don't include DP back to the manufacturer or toss them in the trash bin. Send the message that it's not acceptable in 2018.
Many ITX builds would benefit hugely from inexpensive and low-TDP graphics. Raven Ridge provides reasonable graphics power especially if used with adaptive sync. Cheap FreeSync monitors are plentiful but generally can only do FreeSync over DP not the FreeSync-over-HDMI proprietary hack. DisplayPort is royalty-free.
A motherboard without displayport messes seriously with AMD's value propositions in the SFF space. Boards with DP should not be this scarce a full dozen years after DP's introduction.
Awesome review. To be honest, it doesn't need some extra special features which would pump up the price. As you wrote, this is a solid board for a nice price that can do a good OC and people with tighter budget can create a small but brilliant gaming machine. In any case, thanks for the review. Just what I needed if someone asked me for an AM4 miniITX build and what board to choose.
"The question could be asked why Biostar went with the X470 chipset over the B450 chipset as there are no specific X470 features that this board would benefit from over B450 due to the mini-ITX form factor, but from a marketing point of view, X470 comes across as a higher end chipset and from this aspect, it would make a lot of sense."
And that's the real question for me, not how it's better than the x370 version. Your B450 roundup says the ASRock B450 Gaming-ITX/ac and ASUS ROG Strix B450-I Gaming each have a better audio codec (Realtek ALC1220), better NIC (Intel 1211AT), and Wi-Fi with bluetooth. The ASRock supports 3466+ speeds as opposed to this board's 3200+, has HDMI 2.0 and DP 1.2 as opposed to HDMI 1.4 and a DVI-D port, and the same number of SATA ports, the same number/style of 10 Gbps USB 3.1 slots. From the ASRock article it looks like this board does offer twice the 5Gbps USB 3.0 ports on the back panel, and 2 USB 2.0s on the back panel where the ASRock just has headers for the USB 2.0. The ASRock also has an 8-pin CPU power connector, not 4, and an extra system fan header. And you show it for the same MSRP of $130. The ASUS ROG I don't see a separate article for, but the roundup mentions an AIO connector and a bunch of blinky lights I don't care about and is probably way more expensive, but still: what makes this 470 board better than those two B450 ITX boards? Some extra USB ports on the back and DPC latency?
When will finally someone present ITX board utilizing graphic output to the maximum ? AM4 APUs have 4 graphic channel outputs.
Gimme an ITX board with 3 or better yet 4 DP outputs and I'll imediately purchase couple.
Funny enough, even FM2+ socket boards have had models with better video output options....
Now that we have VERY decent APU with all that RAM bandwidth, 4 CPU kickass cores, 11 GPU cores and L3 cache, and above all with Ryzen 2 at the doors, and NO ITX board that would be able to give all that hardware to show all its potential...
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Marlin1975 - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - link
Thanks for the Power Delivery Comparison. That's something that is hard to check for if not in a good review. Keep up the good work.gavbon - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - link
Thanks Marlin, appreciated! We're looking to further add to this going forwardMrCommunistGen - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - link
I actually really appreciate this as well because this kind of information has been hard to come by in the past. I had some questions regarding the included table.The ASRock B450 Gaming ITX/ac is listed in the table as using the same controller (ISL95712) in "6+2" mode. The spec sheet for ISL95712 states that it is up to a 4+3 controller. The table also doesn't list any doublers. Doesn't this make the board a "big 3+2" rather than a 6+2?
I didn't look at any of the other boards in the table closely, but I was just doing a bunch of reading on the ASRock ITX boards recently and so I was looking very closely at that line in the table.
Thanks for the review!
TeutonJon78 - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
It would help more if it was accurate.The ISL95712 maxes out at 4+3 phases, so it can't run in 6+2 as listed in the chart. On the ASRock boards, then run a 3+2 setup but with two sets of MOSFETs and chokes in parallel, but not doubled. There is only one capacitor per phase. It helps keep the temps down by splitting the current, but it's still only a 3 phase design.
Plus, it would be more meaningful if the chart was for similar style boards rather than a smattering of different form factors.In this case, the other m-ITX boards.
DanNeely - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - link
Just thinking about POST times, when UEFI was the next big thing we'd been repeatedly promised that it'd allow 1-2s POST times because unlike BIOS it could start components up in parallel instead of 1 at a time.While current boards do post faster than their predecessors the speedup never came close to meeting the hype. Does anyone know why reality fell so short of the promise?
Dragonstongue - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - link
likely because there is so much crud to siphon through before it completes the processthe same from going to post to OS log screen to fully booted OS
am sure there are ways to "speed it up" but often those methods come with chance of something terrible happening and not knowing what took place.
be happy the new stuff is WAY quicker and more energy efficient then the old 9/10 so even if it takes a wee bit longer to boot up, patience come to those whom wait.
SSD helps that much I know, but as far as only 1 to 2s to finish post..umm I personally never heard of such promises, the board I am using is AM3/3+ M5A99X EVO (v1) which uses a UEFI based bios design and just going from HDD to SSD made post much quicker and a few changes I made as well to speed it up also helped.
I personally have more issue with how long it takes to shut down then be fully booted up ^.^
Vatharian - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - link
As fun as it sounds there are 10 year old systems that run on UEFI. I must say, that boot times are much quicker on them, while supporting much wider range of hardware. Feature-wise it's hit or miss, I have 9 year old board that's capable of booting from NVMe, thanks to drivers being easy to punch in, but it won't allow user mode to write to boot manager area, thus linux bootloader installation will fail (I just have to point the path manually from the UEFI setup).JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - link
Ahmdal's Law, in a way. There is a relative speedup to be had, but desktops don't need to be shutdown/restarted extremely often. Often just letting it go into sleep mode is adequate for me, and leaves my workspace in exactly the same place it was before.For laptops or other mobile devices, shutting down is more necessary when moving between work environments, (given that sleep mode will drain battery life over time anyways, hibernate isn't ideal and can clog the main storage disk with a file equal in size to your capacity in memory, etc.). For mobile PC devices, I have personally noted that boot times are appreciably fast.
Also, personal anecdote, but I've had boards that when set to options for "fast booting", not only would it refuse to take in DEL or F11 prompts to get into BIOS screen when booting up, but it would go from a stable (normal) bootup, to a blazingly fast crash/reboot cycle for 5 loops before landing me back on the BIOS page with stock settings. This is before and after BIOS updates.
Personal opinion, but I just think it's intentional that for the enthusiast PC market that vendors don't _want_ to speed up boot times because the same users buying these motherboards are enthusiasts likely willing or needing to occasionally go into BIOS and change boot order of disks, or do overclocking features, etc. and making sure users can actually get into BIOS easily and reliably (hence a slow boot with ample time to opt-in to boot to BIOS) may have been one of their intended design goals.
Vatharian - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - link
There is reverse effect in action: amount of stuff that is set to initialize during boot is staggering. I'd asku you to find 1MB legacy BIOS, while 16MB UEFI is not uncommon, and I am in a possession of motherboard that has 512 MB SPI flash for it (not 512 megabits - half a gigabyte). Then, amount of stuff you can boot from went trough the roof. On top of drivers for everything that need to start up and register, there are at least three different frameworks that monitor hardware and need to set up.Then, every damn power controller, voltage regulator, thermal zones, OC chips are smart need to boot up too.
Then, amount of memory skyrocketed - if you remember old BIOS happily running memcheck kilobyte after kilobyte, until it reaches that 64MB, and compare to you 64GB system, that still gets a cursory check, despite memory NOT being 1024x faster.
You can cut your boot time down, if you properly disable CSM, disable external controllers (or at least disable their boot rom), properly set up boot sequence to UEFI bootloader, and use GPU with a BIOS that supports GOP, and finally enable fast boot, your PC WILL boot in ~2-3 seconds plus OS.
On the other hand, while handling servers I am accustomed to boot times on the orders of 20 minutes at extreme case.
Death666Angel - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - link
My system (H87 with NVME boot mod BIOS) gets to windows faster than my 4k DP monitor wakes up from standby. The DVI one is a bit faster. I guess around 3 seconds maybe?Stuka87 - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - link
Just about every motherboard out offers a fast boot mode. My 4 year old desktop goes from power button being pushed to windows login screen in 6 seconds. My new laptop is pretty similar, and thats with Dell's bloated UEFI.lightningz71 - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - link
Please, on ITX boards, can you conduct testing with a RYZEN 2400G? These are great boards for doing reasonable cost home entertainment and SFF builds with, and that's a solid use case for the 2400G. Testing the SOC VRMs for their comparive ability to support iGPU overclocks on those APUs would be invaluable.jeremyshaw - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - link
Raven Ridge unified the CPU and GPU voltage rail.gavbon - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - link
I can see where you are coming from, but our AM4 test bench is designed to test the motherboards on an even playing field with the same hardware. While users might consider the X470GTN as perfect for the 2400G, even I think it's suited, not every board has video outputs to test.jensend - Thursday, October 25, 2018 - link
No DisplayPort = instant disqualification. There's no excuse for this any more.Review sites should just send mobos that don't include DP back to the manufacturer or toss them in the trash bin. Send the message that it's not acceptable in 2018.
Many ITX builds would benefit hugely from inexpensive and low-TDP graphics. Raven Ridge provides reasonable graphics power especially if used with adaptive sync. Cheap FreeSync monitors are plentiful but generally can only do FreeSync over DP not the FreeSync-over-HDMI proprietary hack. DisplayPort is royalty-free.
A motherboard without displayport messes seriously with AMD's value propositions in the SFF space. Boards with DP should not be this scarce a full dozen years after DP's introduction.
PC Crazy - Thursday, October 25, 2018 - link
Awesome review. To be honest, it doesn't need some extra special features which would pump up the price. As you wrote, this is a solid board for a nice price that can do a good OC and people with tighter budget can create a small but brilliant gaming machine. In any case, thanks for the review. Just what I needed if someone asked me for an AM4 miniITX build and what board to choose.artifex - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
"The question could be asked why Biostar went with the X470 chipset over the B450 chipset as there are no specific X470 features that this board would benefit from over B450 due to the mini-ITX form factor, but from a marketing point of view, X470 comes across as a higher end chipset and from this aspect, it would make a lot of sense."And that's the real question for me, not how it's better than the x370 version. Your B450 roundup says the ASRock B450 Gaming-ITX/ac and ASUS ROG Strix B450-I Gaming each have a better audio codec (Realtek ALC1220), better NIC (Intel 1211AT), and Wi-Fi with bluetooth. The ASRock supports 3466+ speeds as opposed to this board's 3200+, has HDMI 2.0 and DP 1.2 as opposed to HDMI 1.4 and a DVI-D port, and the same number of SATA ports, the same number/style of 10 Gbps USB 3.1 slots. From the ASRock article it looks like this board does offer twice the 5Gbps USB 3.0 ports on the back panel, and 2 USB 2.0s on the back panel where the ASRock just has headers for the USB 2.0. The ASRock also has an 8-pin CPU power connector, not 4, and an extra system fan header. And you show it for the same MSRP of $130. The ASUS ROG I don't see a separate article for, but the roundup mentions an AIO connector and a bunch of blinky lights I don't care about and is probably way more expensive, but still: what makes this 470 board better than those two B450 ITX boards? Some extra USB ports on the back and DPC latency?
Brane2 - Tuesday, October 30, 2018 - link
Another "meh" model.When will finally someone present ITX board utilizing graphic output to the maximum ?
AM4 APUs have 4 graphic channel outputs.
Gimme an ITX board with 3 or better yet 4 DP outputs and I'll imediately purchase couple.
Funny enough, even FM2+ socket boards have had models with better video output options....
Now that we have VERY decent APU with all that RAM bandwidth, 4 CPU kickass cores, 11 GPU cores and L3 cache, and above all with Ryzen 2 at the doors, and NO ITX board that would be able to give all that hardware to show all its potential...