Mini-ITX Face-Off: Asrock Z68M-ITX-HT vs. Asrock A75M-ITX

Overclocking

At best, we were only able to squeeze 100MHz more out of this processor and a 3% overclock is hardly worth talking about. What's more, this meager figure wouldn't let us accurately discuss the overclocking abilities of Asrock's Z68M-ITX/HT.

Therefore, we reconfigured the Z68M-ITX/HT with the Core i7-2600K, which has an unlocked multiplier. Without much trouble, the Z68M-ITX/HT arrived at a maximum frequency of 4.4GHz using a 44x clock multiplier and 1.500v on the vcore.

In a sense, that's a mediocre overclock for this processor as most standard ATX motherboards using the Z68 chipset have reached somewhere around 4.7 to 4.8GHz. However, we found the overclock commendable for a Mini-ITX motherboard.

Paired with the affordable A8-3850, the A75M-ITX managed a stable 3.4GHz -- a mild 17% bump. But again, we consider this to be a decent overclock as most standard ATX motherboards using the A75 chipset have "only" reached 3.5 to 3.6GHz.