ZOTAC Z68-ITX WiFi LGA1155 Review 38

ZOTAC Z68-ITX WiFi LGA1155 Review

Board Software »

BIOS Walkthrough

BIOS Options
ClocksRangeStep Size
CPU BCLK:100 MHz ... 300 MHz0.01 MHz
PCI-E Frequency:100 MHz ... 300 MHz0.01 MHz
Memory Dividers: x8 (1066 MHz), x10 (1333 MHz),
x12 (1600 MHz), x14 (1866 MHz), x16 (2133 MHz)
VoltagesRangeStep Size
CPU Turbo Vcore:+0.00 V ... +1020 mV1.0 mV
DRAM Voltage:-0.10 ... +0.16 VVaries
PCH Voltage:+0.03 V ...+ 0.15 V0.03 V


The Z68-ITX WiFi comes with a standard AMI UEFI BIOS, which does offer mouse support. With a very simple layout, it's easy to navigate, and the mouse support is hardly even needed, but a nice addition anyway.


On the Advanced tab we find the "X-Setting" option, which leads into several pages that offer CPU and memory tweaking options, with a couple of voltage options tossed in, but not nearly enough as we'd expect from an overclocking board. We found this strange, as the memory options seen in the third image above are almost everything anyone needs, except of course, a Command Rate setting. Voltage options, on the other hand, are restricted to just CPU Turbo voltage, DIMM voltage, and PCH voltage, with the critical CPU PLL and VCCIO options missing, like the very common "Loadline Calibration" failing to make an appearance as well.


Monitoring and CPU info pages are as expected, with the PC Health page covering the more important voltage settings, and the CPU Configuration page provides access to commonly used CPU settings like Hyper-Threading and Virtualization.


The chipset page offers access to iGPU customization, which we expected to find on the X-Setting page, with just about every option we needed located here. We also find access to onboard device settings, which has nothing to do with the chipset at all, either; a very confusing situation that we feel ZOTAC needs to spend some time on.


"Boot", "Security", and "Exit" pages are feature standard AMI UEFI options, with a section on the "Exit" page provided to save user settings, a small thing that did help ZOTAC save a bit of face in the BIOS department. On a whole, we were left feeling disappointed, but reality helps remind us that for the mini-ITX form-factor, this board does offer a lot, even though it's not enough that we are comfortable with ZOTAC claiming anything even remotely similar to overclocking options. If ZOTAC had claimed "Mini-Overclock" on the board's surface printing we would have called it cute, and quite fitting, but the bold claim of "Super Overclock" printed with big letters leaves a bitter taste in our collective mouth, as it seems like a fallacy given the limited options provided in BIOS.
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Apr 25th, 2024 14:06 EDT change timezone

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