That’s right, we did it again, the ASUS Rog Strix X570 I Gaming Mini ITX Am3 motherboard. This is the motherboard we have been dreaming about since day one. It’s the size of a standard mini-ITX motherboard and has 4 USB 3.0 ports, 2 DisplayPort ports, 1 HDMI port, 1x 6-pin ATX power connector, a front USB 3.0 header, and a back USB 3.0 header.
When that motherboard was first announced back in January, I was blown away. It was exactly what I needed in my gaming rig.
I don’t know about you, but the first thing I did when I saw the name “ASUS” on the back of the motherboard was to reach for my wallet. With any luck I’ll get that money back at the end of the year when I’m able to purchase that motherboard. Once I get it, I’ll be able to tell everyone that I’m a member of the ASUS team.
The USB 3.0 ports on the motherboard aren’t really anything special. They’re an interface into the Asus USB 3.0 hub, and as such they don’t really add anything to the motherboard. If you’re not really a USB 3.0 fan, they might come in handy as a second port for USB thumb drives too.
The chipset in this motherboard is really pretty, and it’s a good one. A good chipset will typically have a high-quality PCI Express bus, and it will have a decent amount of PCIe slots. The card slot itself is a little under-powered and has a bit of a weak link, but it’s not a dealbreaker. A faster chipset will have more PCI Express slots, more of a stronger link, and a faster PCIe bus.
This motherboard is a cheap one, but it doesn’t have a good overall chipset. It also has less PCIe slots than I expected, which is a dealbreaker with this board. The chipset seems really good though, and Asus can still use that as a good selling point on this board.
The motherboard I’m running has an ASUS Z170 motherboard with an intel core i3 CPU. It’s the first board I’ve bought with an i3 CPU, and it’s a good one. I only have one hard drive, but I’m using two SSD drives, so I’m happy. The chipset is definitely good – its only a slight downgrade from the Z170 I used before, but I’m using a different motherboard now, with a slightly faster cpu.
Asus is a big name and is currently making their own processors, but this is probably one of the last good i3 processors the company made. Its a decent processor, but the chipset has a bad habit of overheating, and I see no reason to buy a motherboard with a cooler.
The chipset is a newer beast, not the one from the i5-2400M. Its a Intel Core i3-2340M, with a lower clock speed of 1.6GHz compared to the i5-2400M, but with the same integrated graphics card and the same memory bandwidth.
Asus’ other processors are a bit of a mixed bag. The i3-2340M’s performance is mediocre at best, and the mini-ITX (mITX) motherboard features an Intel Core i3-2370M quad-core processor, with a 1.8GHz clock speed. The CPU is clocked at 2.0Ghz, and the graphics card is the same as the i5-2400M.