10th gen itx silliness.

[honegod]

My main machine, a strix H270i went belly up.
I am looking at a strix Z490i to replace it.
Mainly because that is all I can find on Amazon that looks like it will do what I want.
I do NOT intend to overclock this machine and am mostly after reliability as a daily driver.
Hence Asus and Intel.
A H470i would suit but does not show as available new, a requirement in this build.

Is there a itx board for tenth gen that is famed for its reliability, available new ?
The cpu so far is a i7-10700k

 

[Deleted member 289973]

Looks like your options are Gigabyte's Z490i AORUS Ultra or the ASRock Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3. Both of these are going in the $230s right now. ASUS ROG Strix Z490-I Gaming is about $320. The only H470i available new is going for about $800 so I wouldn't even consider it. Between the first two, Gigabyte probably makes the better board but I've used an ASRock ITX board in the past and it was fine. If you want to pay the extra $80-90 then the ASUS is probably your best bet.
Intel's 500 Series chipsets are compatible with tenth-gen CPUs, however, so if you wanted to look at Z590s, H570s, or even the B560s you could save some money. If you're set on sticking with the Z490s then I'd get the Gigabyte or the ASUS, depending on how much you're willing to spend.

 

[honegod]

I am fully frustrated, where can I go to get a search result that actually contains what I am searching for.

I used to frequent Newegg for deciding what to buy, then they changed to this random result format that Amazon shares.

IS there anyplace where asking for "Asus itx h570" will NOT give me an gigabyte amd atx board in the top 5 results ?

This actually makes me sad.

 

[Deleted member 289973]

I use PCPartPicker to narrow my searches down, find something I like, then I'll search for the exact product where I plan to shop.
https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/#s=39&f=8 - this link is specified to fit your i7-10700K and show only ITX boards. You can further narrow down your search based on preferred chipsets, brands, price range, and more. I use this site frequently to compare, recommend, and check compatibility of all sorts of products. Edit: once you select a product, it shows you which retailers have it available and for how much, including Amazon and Newegg.

 

[honegod]

HAIL YES
Thank you VERY much.

 

[chameleoneel]

My main machine, a strix H270i went belly up.
I am looking at a strix Z490i to replace it.
Mainly because that is all I can find on Amazon that looks like it will do what I want.
I do NOT intend to overclock this machine and am mostly after reliability as a daily driver.
Hence Asus and Intel.
A H470i would suit but does not show as available new, a requirement in this build.

Is there a itx board for tenth gen that is famed for its reliability, available new ?
The cpu so far is a i7-10700k

https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813144460?Description=b560i motherboard&cm_re=b560i_motherboard-_-13-144-460-_-Product
MSI's later release 500 series baords were some of the very few, which Wired the first NVME slot for both the CPU and the chipset. So, when you use the board with a 10th gen chip, you can use both NVME slots.


If you aren't overclocking the CPU, this B560i should be a fine board for a 10700k. You can still use XMP and overclock the RAM, with B560.

 

[honegod]

Asus rog strix Z490i
I7-10700K
Noctua NH-U14s
On order, to be delivered 7/8 (friday)

I pulled the trigger a couple hours before your post, stealthseasnake.

a thing I do NOT like about the strix is having both m.2s stacked one atop the other, it would have been sweet if they could have put a third m.2 on the underside of the board too.

 

[chameleoneel]

it would have been sweet if they could have put a third m.2 on the underside of the board too.

The first/only ITX board to do that, is MSI's Z690 ITX Unify.

 

[honegod]

Thank you for waiting until I was settled in my purchase before hitting me with that.
Ddr5 memory, and new generation m.2s , I would have been wanting to spend twice as much as I did, to watch movies and post memes.

 

[Wade88]

Did it turn out well, honegod?

 

[honegod]

yes.
mechanically everything unplugged and unscrewed uneventfully and the old parts came off smoothly.
very little dust buildup even on the M.2 drive that I had dropped a Noctua 60mm directly atop of, not to blow air on, just to disrupt the surface boundry at.
I wanted to do something similar with this board, but that stacking business uses up all the space under the cpu HS.
the more I deal with it the less I like the way ROG STRIX deals with M.2 drives.
instead of attaching directly to the board the H270i stacked the M.2 atop a chipset cooler heatsink, with the (cool looking) m.2 heatsink bolting to the chipset heatsink, to share the load. hence the 60mm fan.
the Z490i double stack m.2 thing is just evil.
very complex assembly, lots of little screws of different sizes, both drives screw to the floating bit that plugs and screws into the board then there is a (cool looking) heatsink that screws on top.
I spent the most time messing with that thing.
then when I got to the screwing the Noctua NH-U14s down stage I find that the heatpipes interfere with that bloody M.2 stack upper heatsink.
...
the samsung M.2 does not require a heatsink so I removed the top piece, and the heatpipes clear.

I would be VERY INTERESTED in a cable adaptor that could plug into the (proprietary ?) motherboard connector to remote mount the M.2-1 and M.2-2 drives in a location of my choosing.
lots of unused surface area on the proposed duct to the Noctua for that. I could have fun devising M.2 bypass slots in the duct to use the CPU fan to cool the M.2s

everything else went, mostly (driver issues), smoothly and I was up and running with 8 cores @ 5000mhz in time to watch Day 1 of the July Basho of GRAND SUMO.
32gb of 3600 running xml, both M.2 online, all 4x12.7gb drives spinning merrily, the 1050ti lighting every bit of the 65" LG oled
the M.2 temperatures peak at 127° for the 960evo and 150° for the 970pro (C drive) WITHOUT the 60mm stirring things up around there.

the 400w seasonic platinum fanless seems to be unfussed.

looking good.

 

[chameleoneel]

yes.
mechanically everything unplugged and unscrewed uneventfully and the old parts came off smoothly.
very little dust buildup even on the M.2 drive that I had dropped a Noctua 60mm directly atop of, not to blow air on, just to disrupt the surface boundry at.
I wanted to do something similar with this board, but that stacking business uses up all the space under the cpu HS.
the more I deal with it the less I like the way ROG STRIX deals with M.2 drives.
instead of attaching directly to the board the H270i stacked the M.2 atop a chipset cooler heatsink, with the (cool looking) m.2 heatsink bolting to the chipset heatsink, to share the load. hence the 60mm fan.
the Z490i double stack m.2 thing is just evil.
very complex assembly, lots of little screws of different sizes, both drives screw to the floating bit that plugs and screws into the board then there is a (cool looking) heatsink that screws on top.
I spent the most time messing with that thing.
then when I got to the screwing the Noctua NH-U14s down stage I find that the heatpipes interfere with that bloody M.2 stack upper heatsink.
...
the samsung M.2 does not require a heatsink so I removed the top piece, and the heatpipes clear.

I would be VERY INTERESTED in a cable adaptor that could plug into the (proprietary ?) motherboard connector to remote mount the M.2-1 and M.2-2 drives in a location of my choosing.
lots of unused surface area on the proposed duct to the Noctua for that. I could have fun devising M.2 bypass slots in the duct to use the CPU fan to cool the M.2s

everything else went, mostly (driver issues), smoothly and I was up and running with 8 cores @ 5000mhz in time to watch Day 1 of the July Basho of GRAND SUMO.
32gb of 3600 running xml, both M.2 online, all 4x12.7gb drives spinning merrily, the 1050ti lighting every bit of the 65" LG oled
the M.2 temperatures peak at 127° for the 960evo and 150° for the 970pro (C drive) WITHOUT the 60mm stirring things up around there.

the 400w seasonic platinum fanless seems to be unfussed.

looking good.

Interesting about the Heatpipes contacting the M.2. stack. Noctua says the U14s has no issues.

Do you happen to have one of the U14s variations?

https://ncc.noctua.at/motherboards/model/ASUS-ROG-STRIX-Z490-I-Gaming-3957

NH-U14S
NH-U14S DX-3647		Mechanically incompatible
NH-U14S DX-4189		Mechanically incompatible
NH-U14S TR4-SP3		Mechanically incompatible

 

[honegod]

I was quite suprised at the contact, I had checked the noctua compatability for the motherboard and saw it fits.
the one I got has mounts for the LGA 1200 not Xeon or Threadripper.

I thought maybe I got the assembly of the tower of cludge wrong, but no improvement happened and it LOOKED like it was assembled properly, no weird gaps or the like.
plus, it WORKS, still assembled the same way just with the top piece not installed.
with all the tiny high speed connections in the plugs, getting them plugged in wrong should be pretty obvious.
and samsung magician says they are both happy.


I could file grooves to clear the heatpipes into the heatsink, but it integrates frag lighting that I would certainly short circuit.

I should have taken pictures to send to noctua but I was very much in hair pulling mode and did not want to.
even to look at it I have to pull the videocard.
fie upon it until my mood improves.

 

[honegod]

the "heatsink" is a heat spreader, a hefty solid slab of aluminium about 5mm thick.
it is a crisp diecasting with no deburring on the mold seam corners.
the lighting frippery is in a cast in void in the upper surface covered with a thin metal plate with very crisp holes carved in it for the light to shine through.
the plate looks glued to the spreader.
very pretty.
reminds me of the heatspreaders on my Gskill memory, not really useful and got in the way, but pretty.
primarily ornamentation.

I did not mention, there is a thermal pad for each M.2, to connect it to its, individual not thermally connected, spreader.
the bottom pad is too thick for the 970pro, the book mentions this feature, no thinner pad is included,
so the C drive is floating in a bubble of still air between the motherboard and the aux board it is mounted to.
probably involving the 23° temperature difference between the two M.2s.

yes I continue to dislike this M.2 mounting solution.

it DOES have the advantage of not having to unmount the motherboard to get to the #2 drive, but both the GPU and CPU cooler still have to go to get to it.

 

[honegod]

a picture from directly above, (the Lian-Li case has the motherboard horizontal) with the computer running.
the 960 is directly above the 970, above the motherboard with a gap between the 970 and the motherboard.
the pins between the m.2 and videocard are on the motherboard,
the caps between the m.2 and the securefirm bracket are on the floating board that both m.2s mount to.

the 60mm noctua is too big to fit in there.

so I bought a 40mm noctua and stuffed it in.

not great, but it does stir the air a bit around the 970, it dropped the temp by 5°c when I plugged it into the case fan ( daisychain with the HDD
fan, and the vidcard fan. that is the fuzzy fan plug at the right using two of the splitters supplied with the noctuas )

 

[honegod]

I am getting off on the tangent of the M.2 plugs in this board.
my initial impression is that the M.2 setup is absolutely unique to this board.
new electrical/signal plugs (2 of them) and a new daughterboard with the actual M.2 plugs and mounts.
I really like the M.2 mounting board by itself.
it is a little bigger than a M.2 and gets sandwiched by the two drives.
both drives point away from the board to expose the chips, for cooling air.
this thing would fit in the duct from the CPU heatsink to the case exhaust fan.
that would take care of overcooling concerns while effectivly addressing higher temperatures and discarding the heat outside of the case.
like I said, I LIKE the board, in theory.
but it bolts flat onto the motherboard, facing the #2 drive directly at the mboard, with minimal air circulation clearance.
Evil.
so cut the plugs off the Dboard and run wires so the assembly can go where I want it.

I would prefer to do this to a second Dboard, so I can keep on using my computer until it is time to plug the new one in.
emailing asus would authorise spam. the tech section offers chat, 9 to 5 and it's 0247.
bet if a replacement Dboard is available it costs as much as a complete new Mboard ?

 

[honegod]

all I need is a set of plugs and ribbon cable to solder together extension cables.
the problem is the plugs.
are they a standard design adapted for this use or are they one off customs for asus ?
I could see needing to mount the plugs onto little boards then wire the boards together.
it doesn't sound too tough, except getting the spare plugs.
if the M.2 setup was common I could see modDIY carrying various length braided cable sets.
DigiKey might stock the plugs in various mounting schemes, but no idea what to call them for searching DigiKey, they seem to expect me to know what I want.

 

[rhkcommander959]

SinLoon M.2(NGFF) Key M NVMe SSD Extension Cable Extender PCIe3.0 x4 Full Speed 12.6inch SSD Extension Cable (32cm) https://a.co/4oFgNXD

Just search m.2 extension cable

 

[honegod]

the daughterboard is mounted to the motherboard at both ends.
so that extension would work great for the top M.2, but the lower drive is complicated by the mount at the drive screw end.
it means the wires have to turn 90° horizontally to get out from under the drive, then turn 90° up to go between the videocard and Dboard.
I want ribbon cable I can fold and crease with impunity. something unaffected by work hardening.

a pair of those extensions stuck together would be smaller than a Dboard allowing greater airflow in the less obstructed duct.
on the other hand those cute little cap looking things on the Dboard make me happy.

 

[honegod]

the more I look at this the uglier it gets.

the Daughterboard mounted, with no drives.
there is a lot of electronics on the thing which hopefully helps the drives operate better and more reliably.


the motherboard where the Dboard plugs in.

the chunk of metal is the magic device that takes heat from the lower drive and makes it ... not vanish into thin air ?

notice how the front plug is tucked inside the rear panel cover box

which will force the cable to twist around a bit to get out.
or if the plug has to be soldered to a board for the wires to go to, the board has room to stick out only one side, towards us in the picture.
ugly.

the underside of the Dboard

the plugs are not very big but they have LOTS of wires.
I did not get the impression that the two plugs were the same, but it occurs to me that they might be the same plug just swapped genders on each end.

 

[chameleoneel]

You said that the bottom drive peaks at 150 degrees F, without the fan. Which is 65 C-----a fantastic "peak" temp. and WAY below throttling temp.

 

[ND40oz]

As long as they don't overheat, which they don't appear to be doing, there's no issue. What Lian-Li case are you using and what's the rest of the cooling setup with it?

 

[honegod]

my definition of "peaks" is that is the max temperature recorded by CPUID HWmonitor since the last restart.
the bottom drive is operating as the C drive in windows 10.
so my peak might not be really useful as anything more than low use rate.
I just copied a 17gb folder to C from a hdd, then moved that folder to a different hdd, the C drive temp went from 60° to 64° and back down to 60° just as quickly.

 

[ND40oz]

https://www.hdsentinel.com/

This will keep track of the peak temps, run it for a week and see how hot things actually peak at.

 

[DanNeely]

I am fully frustrated, where can I go to get a search result that actually contains what I am searching for.

I used to frequent Newegg for deciding what to buy, then they changed to this random result format that Amazon shares.

IS there anyplace where asking for "Asus itx h570" will NOT give me an gigabyte amd atx board in the top 5 results ?

This actually makes me sad.

Newegg's free text search might not do what you want, but the sidebar filters do:

Unfortunately after setting ITX and H570, the only board they carry is from ASRock.

https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007627 601361682 601361316

 

[honegod]

What Lian-Li case are you using and what's the rest of the cooling setup with it?

PC-Q33B​

Noctua NHU14S on cpu
Noctua NF-A12x25 blowing on the videocard heatsink
Noctua 140mm industrial 2000 rpm blowing on stack of hard drives
Seasonic fanless PSU
30x10 Noctua annoying the air around the M.2 drives.

I pulled the hinges for the front/top panel and run it open air.

 

[ND40oz]

I probably wouldn't have used a fan-less PSU in that case since there's no way you can make the entire build fan-less, especially since it supports an ATX PSU with a larger fan. But at least the exhaust fan should give decent airflow combined with the CPU cooler over that area. Much better than the front mount fan in my PC-Q25 does.

 

[honegod]

I probably wouldn't have used a fan-less PSU in that case since there's no way you can make the entire build fan-less

the original plan was to cut a huge hole in the front and mount a 200mm noctua as intake, with the cpu and vid card fans as exaust.
but the notion of 50tb worth of harddrives changed that.

 

[ND40oz]

the original plan was to cut a huge hole in the front and mount a 200mm noctua as intake, with the cpu and vid card fans as exaust.
but the notion of 50tb worth of harddrives changed that.

I really wish they would have updated the Q25 sometime in the last 10 years. If you wanted to stuff an mITX cube full of hard drives, it was hard to beat the 7 3.5" disks that it supported. The Q58 is cool, but I wouldn't even try to stuff one 3.5" drive in mine even though it's technically supported.

 

[honegod]

I really do not like mounting the motherboard sideways, finding cases with flat motherboards is non trivial.
finding a aluminium case with a flat itx board AND six 3.5s, I'd have to buy three, experimental, use, and backup unaltered.
the other two hdds, I like the idea of using adaptors from the usb3 front panel plugs, 5gbs should be plenty fast.

 

[chameleoneel]

my definition of "peaks" is that is the max temperature recorded by CPUID HWmonitor since the last restart.
the bottom drive is operating as the C drive in windows 10.
so my peak might not be really useful as anything more than low use rate.
I just copied a 17gb folder to C from a hdd, then moved that folder to a different hdd, the C drive temp went from 60° to 64° and back down to 60° just as quickly.

Techpowerup without fan blowing on it (no heatsink) (red line is the temp. It takes about 140-ish seconds with no fan, to start throttling)

with fan blowing on it (red line is temp. This suggests that your system is cooling the drive quite sufficiently. Although, you may not yet have written any files which take over 2 minutes, to really be sure I guess).

"Without a fan, the drive will start throttling once its internal temperature monitoring reports around 80°C. The throttling is fairly well-behaved, though, as it only drops from 2 GB/s to 1.5 GB/s and not all the way down to keep the drive's temperature in check. To put things into perspective, at 2 GB/s, for 150 seconds, the drive will only start thermal throttling after 300 GB of data have been written."

 

[LZ_Xray]

Dboard

My pratfall mind will not stop interpreting this as “doucheboard”