Zotac H87ITX-A-E Desktop Motherboard - Intel H87 Express Chipset - Socket H3 LGA-1150

Pros: I love this little motherboard. The BIOS is fantastic if you actually know what you're doing. I've been working with/on PCs for almost 20yrs so I'm not pampered by gimped GUI BIOS systems. The overall quality of this board is great with a perfect layout for SFF and micro-PC builds. I love this little board. I paired it with 2x 4GB of Crucial LP Ballistix 1.35v, an i3-4340 which was a real shocker of a chip, a 256GB Plextor M5M (Marvell) which gives many desktop SSDs a run for their money, and an M350 case with a 120-watt PicoPSU. I have the whole thing VESA mounted behind my TV running Ubuntu 13.10 without a problem. I'm able to do light gaming, heavy streaming, photo editing & content creation, and every other normal everyday use case perfectly. Again, I just love this little guy. WELL DONE ZOTAC!!! Now please make an FM2+ version for Kaveri ; ).

Cons: Truthfully, none! I have 1 issue where running Parted Magic from RAM I can't seem to use a wireless keyboard, but how many other people are going to be running a system like that?

Overall Review: Keep in mind this is not an over-clocking motherboard since it's based on the H87 chipset. I have no idea what the other reviewer had going on, but I have no issues with this product at all aside from what I said above. This is by far the best non-OC mini-itx 1150 socket motherboard available right now.

Pros: I bought this for a silent HTPC build and was sold on the included wifi.

Cons: I ran into issues trying to get past POST and after an hour or two or troubleshooting I diagnosed it as a bad DIMM 2 slot. Since i have a passively cooled CPU that was a huge pain to install, doing a RMA isn't something I really feel like doing. At least I can run my box with one stick of RAM.

Pros: Small form factor, 2x mini-pcie -- supports provided wifi adapter + SSD, dual LAN ports. This board has everything one would need for a small, compact, low power HTPC.

Cons: Audio over HDMI does not work with Intel HD Graphics 4600 processor (i7-4770s in my case). Intel does not appear willing to fix this issue, and Zotac support simply claims (paraphrasing) (1) latest BIOS has any fixes Intel has provided related to this issue included, (2) latest Intel graphics driver resolves the issue. I have been going back and forth with Zotac for 3 weeks around this with no resolution. Issue: HDMI silent stream issue. I play a video with DTS-MA audio output, pause it, wait for 30 seconds for all system sounds to die out, push play on the same video, sound is -50dB from original. AVR audio guard does not resolve issue. Seen in Server 2008 R2 Sp1. DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT IF YOU INTEND ON WATCHING DIGITAL VIDEO (YouTube, BDR, etc...) USING THE ON-BOARD HDMI CONNECTION.

Overall Review: I am extremely disappointed in the way that these two companies have handled this issue. How hard can it be to enable basic board functionality? Add-in video cards do not have this issue.

Pros: It looks good (I love the orange!) It has all the bells and whistles you'd expect

Cons: The SATA cables are Black and not orange <-This is minor Constant problems with the USB ports <-This is major My power supply worked fine with my previous motherboard and the same devices, but on this board plugging in an external HDD will turn off my mouse, or the mouse will just randomly turn off in the middle of usage, the portable HDD and keyboard will just lose connectivity in the middle of a file transfer or sentence, my 360 controller will randomly turn off.... And these problems are Constant but not consistent. Every time it takes a few moment for connections to be reestablished. I understand that I have a lot of devices hooked up, but I've never had an issue in the past. This effects USB 3.0 and 2.0 equally. My power supply is 700 watts. My only other complaint is the positioning of the USB 3.0 port. My cooler was shaped to allow high profile memory, but the cable was so close (and they're typically so stuff and upward) that it was cutting into the fins of the heat-sink. I ended up switching to liquid cooling to fix that issue since the footprint on the board is smaller.

Overall Review: On that last note though, I was a bit disappointed with the fan controls. I was unable to set both fan controllers on Auto successfully, for some reason it made the fan set to 'case fan' run at full speed and the CPU fan to a standard variable that made sense. In my case, both fans were intake and exhaust for my radiator (I used a molex converter for the pump). To fix this I set the CPU fan (intake fan) to auto and I set the 'case fan' (radiator exhaust) to manual and the slowest speed available (30%). That has worked, but obviously it won't change dynamically with need.

Pros: msata - quiet and save an sata. dual nic if you need it. on board wireless

Cons: Well, not exact DOA but end result is not usable. Installed ubuntu 12.04. Booted fine but crashed randomly. Ran memtest, millions of errors at fixed bit location (0x0000##00) on G.Skill 1600. Tried different combo/setting, swapped to Corsiar 1333, same result. And the memory were good on other boxes but looked every address was bad here.

Overall Review: I had high hope for this. I dont need overclock and all that. Just want a stable, quiet htpc with low energy bills. Paired with Haswell 4130T. Was piecing together parts so missed return window.