Intel DH61AG Apple Glen Mini-ITX Motherboard Review

By Steven Walton on November 9, 2011  Editor: Matthew DeCarlo

The battle to deliver the ultimate HTPC platform is heating up and has largely been waged between AMD and Intel. In the past, home theater machines have struggled to overcome various issues such as poor integrated graphics performance, power consumption, thermals, noise and size. However, many of these issues were addressed in January 2010 when Intel unleashed a new processor range codenamed "Clarkdale."

Based on a 32nm process, they were the first modern CPUs to incorporate an on-die GPU, which was dubbed Intel Graphics Media Accelerator HD. Although Clarkdale chips solved many of the HTPC-specific problems faced by its predecessors, it still lacked proper support. Intel has since replaced Clarkdale with today's "Sandy Bridge" range, which boasts superior CPU and GPU performance with even less power consumption.

We recently reviewed a Mini-ITX Asrock motherboard designed to accommodate Intel's second-gen Core processors. The Z68M-ITX/HT impressed us as it was not only able to utilize the latest Intel processors but it also supported high-end PCI Express graphics cards. This made it an excellent entertainment solution as it was capable of replacing your Blu-ray player along with your gaming console.

Today's review item is a little different as we check out the Intel desktop board DH61AG, also known as "Apple Glen." Built around Intel's H61 chipset, which is designed to offer the most basic features to the Sandy Bridge platform, the DH61AG doesn't seem all that exciting on the surface. However, if you gaze a little deeper, you'll see this is no ordinary Mini-ITX motherboard. In fact, it's quite different than Asrock's HTPC offering.

Intel's DH61AG is based on the Thin Mini-ITX form factor, which was introduced on October 2010 and is targeted for smaller system form factors with a 0.78" (20mm) tall PCB/component design and a 1" (25mm) back panel I/O height. In other words, the DH61AG is designed to be fully compatible with low height components prevalent in the HTPC world, such as SO-DIMMs as well as full and half-length PCI Express mini-cards.

The board also utilizes Sandy Bridge's integrated graphics engine with support for HDMI and DVI-I which is complemented by flexible eDP or LVDS flat panel display support. The combination of low height components, premium features and an external power supply make the DH61AG the perfect solution for high performance AIO (all-in-one), Tiny FF (Form Factor) and home theater systems. Let's move in for a closer look…

Features & Specifications

Living up to the name of its form factor, the board measures an extremely compact 6.7 x 6.7 inches (17 x 17cm). Naturally, the primary focus here is size and everything about the DH61AG is designed to make it as small as possible. As such, it drops many of the features found on other LGA1155 motherboards, making the Z68 or even the H67 chipsets somewhat overkill. Therefore, Intel has used its most basic Cougar Point chipset: the H61.

Compared to the H67, there are quite a few features missing -- some more important than others. For example, the H61 chipset only supports two DIMM slots, 10 USB 2.0 ports, six PCI Express 2.0 lanes (2.5GT/s) and four SATA 3Gb/s ports. The H67 can handle four DIMM slots, 14 USB 2.0 ports, eight PCI Express 2.0 lanes (2.5GT/s), two SATA 6Gb/s ports and four SATA 3Gb/s ports. SATA 6Gb/s support is likely the most significant feature missing, and we should note that the H61 doesn't have any CPU or GPU performance tuning options.

The Intel DH61AG motherboard carries two SO-DIMM slots (support for up to 16GB dual-channel memory at 1066/1333MHz), two PCIe mini-card connectors (one half-length, one full-/half-length), a single PCIe x4 slot, two SATA ports, eSATA and USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports with high-current support, 10-channel audio, and Gigabit LAN. The board is hardly short on features and functionality considering its paltry footprint.

The SATA 3Gb/s ports are connected to the H61 chipset and the board features a SATA power connector onboard. When using the supplied power cable, the DH61AG can power two 3.5" or 2.5" devices. Additionally, the full size Mini-PCIe slot also supports mSATA SSDs such as the Intel 310 Series, 311 Series, Kingston SSDNow SMS100S2 and OCZ Nocti Series. The 3Gb/s eSATA connector on the I/O panel is also connected to the H61.

The 10-channel audio is delivered by a rather traditional choice in the Realtek ALC892 codec. This 8 + 2 analog audio codec is often found on high-end motherboards. However, Intel has only implemented analog/digital line-out and analog line-in on the back panel. The 8-channel (7.1) Intel HD Audio is supported when using HDMI. The board can also handle in-chassis stereo speakers, S/PDIF digital audio output, DMIC digital microphone input as well as front panel HD Audio/AC’97 headphones/mic support via onboard headers.

USB 3.0 connectivity is tackled by the NEC PD720200, which provides two ports on the board's I/O panel. You'll also see two hi-current USB 2.0 ports, which essentially means they're quicker at charging mobile devices such as smartphones. Network support is provided by an Intel Pro 10/100/1000 integrated NIC (model number 82579V, to be specific) and it has a Thermal Design Power of just 0.66w using the 90nm design process.

Design & Layout

With so many onboard headers, the Intel DH61AG's landscape is fairly unkempt-looking, but everything pieces together well enough and we couldn't spot any major design flaws. Unfortunately, we couldn't showcase the DH61AG in a suitable Thin Mini-ITX chassis as Intel didn't provide one, nor was the appropriate cooler included.

The standard LGA1155 box cooler measures 45mm tall, which is far too big for use in a thin chassis, though it can be installed on the DH61AG without any problems. There are aftermarket coolers such as the Gelid Slim Silence i-Plus which are much more compact, this particular example is just 28cm tall.

It is important to make sure an aftermarket heatsink will suit the DH61AG before making the purchase, as the CPU socket area is extremely busy. There is a pair of USB 2.0 headers that encroach on the CPU heatsink's territory and we suspect that many aftermarket coolers will block access to these headers.

Directly above the CPU socket are two SO-DIMM slots that are relatively easy to access. We populated them with a pair of G.Skill 4GB DDR3-1333 modules that ran just $40.

Immediately to the left of the SO-DIMMs is a full size mini-PCI Express connector which received a $200 Intel 310 Series 80GB mSATA (SSDMAEMC080G2) card -- a solid boot drive.

There is also a half size mini-PCI Express connector for optional wireless network support -- the $20 Intel WiFi Link 1000 (112BNHMW), in our case.

In the top left hand corner of the board is an internal 19v DC input that allows the DH61AG to take advantage of internal power connectors. There are also two vertically mounted SATA connectors along with a SATA power connector capable of feeding two devices.

Further across the board we have the LVDS/eDP connector designed for uSFF HTPC and AIO systems. Complementing this connector is a series of jumpers that allow display voltage selection, backlight inverter voltage control and display brightness control.

Along with the standard front panel header for the power/reset buttons as well as the hard drive and system activity LEDs, a second header targets home theater users. Known as the HTPC header, it includes a recording LED, HDMI CEC access and more. The consumer IR (CIR) header is also HTPC-orientated and supports an internal Microsoft eHome IR receiver.

Finally the 1" (25mm) tall I/O panel features an external 19v DC plug, dual link DVI port, HDMI-out, eSATA, two USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet and two audio jacks.

Gigabyte G1.Sniper2 Motherboard Review

By Steven Walton

Although Intel rendered its mainstream LGA1156 platform (Socket H) obsolete by launching the Sandy Bridge processors in January, LGA1366 (X58) has remained the company's flagship platform since its consumer debut in November 2008. There's no denying that the Z68 chipset has knocked some wind out of X58's sails, but the near-antiquated socket is still the only way for enthusiasts to get their hands on a six-core Core i7 processor.

Not only does X58 have exclusive support for hexa-core processors, but it's better equipped to handle multi-GPU configurations. Without the aid of Nvidia's NF200 chip, Intel's new Z68 and P67 motherboards can only run two graphics cards in an x8/x8 setup. Because of those reasons, Gigabyte originally released its elite G1.Killer boards (the G1.Guerrilla, G1.Sniper and G1.Assasin) for LGA1366.

Naturally, this prompted requests for LGA1155 versions of Gigabyte's premium boards because the newer platform supports Sandy Bridge, namely the Core i5-2600K and i7-2600K CPUs. Answering to that demand, Gigabyte has unleashed the G1.Sniper2, an enthusiast-minded board based on the Z68 chipset, an amalgamation of Intel's H67 and P67 chipsets with the company's SRT hybrid storage technology.

Priced at $360, the G1.Sniper 2 is $50 cheaper than the original G1.Sniper. Nonetheless, it's a lonely territory in the Z68 market as few products can demand such a high price. The Asus Maximus IV Extreme-Z is among the few boards that reside in this price range, fetching $360 on Newegg, while Gigabyte's own Z68X-UD7-B3 is $350 and stands as one of the most feature-packed boards available.

Like Asus' ROG motherboards, Gigabyte's G1.Killer series targets hardcore users by including additional hardware on-board such as a dedicated sound chip by Creative and a network controller from Bigfoot Networks. Those extras are backed by a fierce matte-black military theme (note the magazine-style heatsink) that is sure to attract gamers. Those niceties make the G1.Sniper2 one of the most expensive Z68 motherboards available, which begs the question: are you getting your money's worth?

Features & Specifications

It's hard to know where to start with a motherboard that seems to have it all. The Gigabyte G1.Sniper2 is a system within itself, removing the need to upgrade anything including the audio and network devices. It's only intended to be outfitted with a graphics cards -- two of them to be exact.

The board offers support for 2-way CrossFireX or 2-way SLI depending on your preference. With such a configuration, however, many gamers find that there minimal (if any) room left to upgrade a motherboard's onboard audio codec with a discrete sound card from Creative or elsewhere.

This won't be an issue for G1.Sniper2 owners, as the board incorporates a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Digital Audio Processor (20K2) supporting X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity and EAX Advanced HD 5.0 technologies.

Additionally, Gigabyte as included a high capacity amplifier, which is able to drive 150Ω loads, allowing gamers to enjoy a fuller range of dynamic sound with crisper details and less distortion when using high quality headphones. The amplifier also features wide bandwidth, low noise, high slew rate and low distortion, making it ideal for professional audio usage. Gigabyte has also equipped the G1.Sniper2 with four additional amplifiers onboard for the center/sub-woofer, rear speaker, side surround and line out.

For those concerned about network lag mucking up their gameplay, Gigabyte has included Bigfoot Networks' Killer E2100 NIC, which is featured on all G1.Killer motherboards. Gigabyte is the only motherboard manufacturer to have implemented the Killer E2100 Gigabit network controller onboard.

Utilizing a unique combination of dedicated Network Processing Unit (NPU) and exclusive Game Networking DNA technology, the Bigfoot Networks Killer E2100 is designed to give the best online gaming experience possible. The Dedicated NPU features its own 1GB DDR2 memory buffer which helps offload network traffic from the CPU, freeing it up to do other important computing tasks.

While Gigabyte has included some very impressive audio and network controllers, the company hasn't forgotten about storage support. Apart from the six SATA 3Gb/s ports attached to the Intel Z68 chip, an additional two SATA ports have been included.

Unfortunately, the Marvell 88SE9172 controller has been embedded rather than the newer and faster 88SE9182. The included chip provides an additional two onboard SATA ports that support 6Gb/s speeds as well as RAID0 and RAID1 arrays.

The G1.Sniper2 is brimming with USB connectivity, exceeding the dozen standard USB 2.0 ports courtesy of two Etron EJ168 controllers that supply four USB 3.0 ports -- two at the rear and another two using a bundled 3.5" front mounted bracket.

Gigabyte has infused the G1.Sniper2 with many of its own technologies as well, such as its DualBIOS feature. With two physical BIOS ROMs onboard, DualBIOS enables quick and seamless recovery from BIOS damage or failure due to viruses or improper updating. It also supports booting from 3TB+ hard drives without requiring you to create partitions.

Gigabyte's On/Off Charge technology is also worth mentioning as it lets you charge devices regardless of whether your PC is on, in standby or even off. What's more impressive is that it allows devices to draw more current than standard USB ports allow, boosting the recharge time over similar "sleep and charge" implementations.

Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3-iSSD Motherboard Review

To the dismay of some early adopters, Intel updated its Cougar Point chipset lineup only four months after Sandy Bridge's January launch. Debuting at CES, the company's second-generation Core series LGA1155 processors were initially accompanied by consumer two chipsets, the H67 and P67.

Each platform presents a unique value perspective: the cheaper H67 has access to Sandy Bridge's built-in graphics, while the pricier P67 supports Intel's unlocked "K" series enthusiast processors with advanced overclocking options.

Unfortunately, neither chipset offers both features and that forced many consumers into a tight spot. Some users simply don't require a dedicated graphics card, but they might still want to milk a little extra performance out of their processor and memory. That's precisely where the Z68 steps in.

Released in May, the Z68 serves as Intel's enthusiast-level LGA1155 platform. In addition to combining the functionality of its H67 and P67 chipsets, the Z68 offers some impressive new features, including Intel's Smart Response Technology.

Smart Response Technology (SRT) is a hybrid storage solution that effectively marries the zero access time of a speedy flash drive with the massive storage capacity of an inexpensive hard drive. In doing so, users can expect to pay a modest price premium for significant speed gains.

When we first tested SRT in our Asrock Z68 Extreme 4 review last month, the results were impressive, even with a relatively cheap Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C 1TB hard drive. Although we didn't witness massive gains across the board, SRT proved to be an efficient hybrid system.

We've seen many impressive Z68 boards since then, but none are more intriguing than what we have today: the Z68XP-UD3-iSSD. Gigabyte's latest Z68 motherboard takes Intel's SRT one step further by including it on-board.

Right out of the box, the Z68XP-UD3-iSSD features an Intel SSD 311 20GB attached via an mSATA connector. Many have complained that the Intel 20GB SLC SSD is too expensive, but we feel $240 for this motherboard/SSD combo is reasonable. How reasonable, you ask? That's precisely what we intend determine.

Encoding Performance

Using HandBrake to encode a small video file, the Core i7 2600K achieved 86fps on all three LGA1155 motherboards making it significantly faster than the 76fps of the Phenom II X6 1100T.

There was a noticeable performance gap between the LGA1155 motherboards when testing with the x264 HD Benchmark. That said, only 4fps separated the slowest board from the fastest while the Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3-iSSD was just 1fps slower than the Asrock P67 Extreme6.

The last encoding test is based on TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress where we converted an AVI file to MPG. This took the Core i7 2600K processor just 6 minutes and 10 seconds on the Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3-iSSD -- a whopping one second faster than the Asrock Z68 Extreme4.

ECS P67H2-A motherboard review

Aaah yea... we are on a freakin' stampede of P67 reviews, and we have more coming. Today the turn goes to the folks from ECS who put out some serious kit on the market.

One of the most talked about topics of technology this year will be Sandy Bridge from Intel and very likely Bulldozer processors from AMD. Intel however started the year fresh and launched a handful of these little Sandy bridge gems already. If you have not done so, please read our reference Core i5 2500K and Core i7 2600K review to get an update on the new processor architecture and the grand performance they deliver.

Of course with new processors also come new motherboard chipsets. For the consumer desktop side of the market you will basically see two Sandy Bridge based chipsets, H68 for the more generic, mainstream and HTPC usage, and then the P67 chipset as a performance part for the new motherboards series. Now each and every motherboard ODM jumped on P67 as well, it's just a heck of a lot of fun. And the ODMs had time to prep their P67 alright, most of the designs were already finished by late Summer 2010, everybody just needed to wait for Intel to release the processor that goes along with these motherboards.

That extra time was however not a bad thing, it gave more time to R&D departments to refine their designs and perhaps be a little more creative.

ECS was also working on a few of these P67 motherboards and is making sure that both NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards work combined together. Yep, they are adding a Lucid Hydra chip like some of the competition is doing as well.

Now granted we are not keen on the extra chip at all, as overall experiences with Hydra are far from impressive or user friendly and adds overall costs to the mainboard you do need to pay for.

Anyway, the offering tested today is the P67H2-A socket LGA 1155 motherboard which is powered by a 14-phase VRM. An absolutely lovely to look at motherboard as this is a serious design you guys.

The motherboard comes with three PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots as well as a pair of PCI Express x1 and two PCI slots. The motherboard also shows dual Gigabit Ethernet and two NEC USB 3.0 controllers that will bring you a total of four USB 3.0 ports. You'll also get six SATA 3 Gbps ports and two SATA 6 Gbps controllers (for two internal ports) and a number of USB 2.0 ports, plus eSATA.

Anyway, have a quick peek and then let's head onwards into the full review.

The Intel 68 Series Chipset

Paired with the new Sandy Bridge based processors comes new motherboard chipsets, ten in total of which five are intended for desktop processors, namely the P67, H67, Q65, Q67 and B65. Next to the new chipsets there is also a small socket change. Previous Clarkdale Core series processors were seated onto a LGA 1156 package (socket). The new SB processors do not share that same socket, Intel placed them onto socket LGA 1155, one pin less.

The primary reason here is that a last generation processor will not work with a series 6 chipset and vice versa. So you can't install by accident, a Clarkdale based Core i5 on a P67 motherboard.

Now, luckily this doesn't mean you'll be needing a new cooler, your old LGA 1156 CPU cooler is compatible with the LGA 1155 motherboard measurements. Let's have a look at the primary features of the 82P67 Platform Controller Hub chipset.

Segment	Corporate	SMB - B65	Consumer H67	Consumer P67
Socket	LGA 1155	LGA 1155	LGA 1155	LGA 1155
Memory channels / DIMM per channel	2 / 2	2 / 2	2 / 2	2 / 2
USB2.0	14	12	14	14
SATA Total (Max number of 6Gb/s)	6 (2)	6 (1)	6 (2)	6 (2)
PCIe 2.0	8	8	8	8
PCI	Yes	Yes	No	No
Integrated Display	2	2	2	n/a
Performance Tuning	No	No	No	Yes

Above, you can see the primary desktop chipsets released, H67 and P67 will be the two chipset you are dealing with. For end consumers like you and me the H67 chipset will be less performance targeted and comes with support for monitor connectivity.

The one significant difference in-between H67 and P67 is that the P67 does not support the embedded GPU inside the processor or any of its functions. P67 requires a dedicated graphics card.

The P67 chipset is targeted at performance and enthusiast end users, allowing much more tweaking and providing performance features. As you can understand, we'll be testing a lot of these chipset based motherboards, some of which will also have support for the new uEFI BIOS. A graphics user interface BIOS that is going to fascinate you.

Interesting to know is that the new 67 series chipsets will come a SATA 6G controller and though not native, all of them will very likely come with USB 3.0 support by using a NEC controller. P67 will have 16 PCIe lanes available for your graphics card (x16) but can be split down into two x8 PCIe lanes for graphics cards if you like to pursuit multi-GPU setup, hence SLI and Crossfire will run quite well on them.

The Intel 82P67 Platform Controller Hub (PCH) SATA2 ports can be configured in RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 with Intel's Rapid Storage Technology.

The chipset now comes standard with an Intel Gigabit LAN (Intel 82579V) controller, on the previous chipsets this was an optional for ODMs, this time around... it simply sits there and can be used by the motherboard ODM likely at a small fee. So I expect a big increase in Intel based LAN connectivity the upcoming year, though a lot of ODMs will still opt to add a Realtek IC.

The motherboard has a lot connectivity on the rear IO panel. Dual Gigabit Ethernet, multiple NEC USB 3.0 connectors that will bring you a total of four USB 3.0 ports, next to the six USB 2.0 ports. Optical TOSLINK S/PDIF audio for eight-channel audio, CMOS clear button, two eSATA connectors yeah that's tucked full alright.