LGA 1155 Motherboards with mSATA on-board

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MrCaffeineX

[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 22, 2011
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Did any manufacturer other than Gigabyte make a socket LGA 1155 motherboard that had a built-in mSATA slot? I have an assortment of other components lying around, including an mSATA SSD and feel like doing some tinkering...
 
I have one of these, also manuf. ECS, in a personal project. Less than a month on it so far, but it seems to be good, if a bit of an odd bird.

It has Ivy Bridge support out of the box but is a H61 chipset board. I can't advise regarding using the mSATA for storage as I have a USB 3.0 socket adapter using that slot. It merits mention that the board lacks that feature entirely. The other commodities like F-audio and F-panel headers are there but no USB3 implementation to be had.

I am using a discrete GPU with HDMI carrying audio and video, so no report on how well the onboard connectors actually work.

Definitely not the same market as the boards listed above, but easy enough to mess with if your needs are modest.

A side note: I linked to amazon, but I bought the board on newegg. I didn't realize until I'd made significant progress on the build that my board was missing the 7-8th USB 2.0 ports. The newegg page lists it with "v1.1" in the model and newegg's photos and specs include such ports; I guess I was sent a previous revision, but it sufficed all the same for my intentions.
 
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Thanks for the suggestions. I looked into those and I couldn't find any information on the ASUS motherboard regarding whether or not the mSATA SSD is replaceable. I am also a little leery of getting another ASUS motherboard as the one that I am trying to replace has not impressed me from a quality or performance standpoint. I did just do a BIOS update last night though, so maybe that will fix things.*

In further researching these motherboards, I stumbled upon the Intel DH77EB. I'm not worried about overclocking (the i3 doesn't OC anyway), but I am still concerned that their motherboard quality may not be the best. I had a nightmare of a time with their DP45SG...The mATX form-factor is appealing and might change my build a bit. I have an mATX chassis that I have yet to find the right guts for.

The mITX recommendations feel too limiting with the lack of RAM slots and expansion slots, even though I don't necessarily have plans to fill them right now, I just feel better with more options for the future. The one with SODIMM support could be interesting for a really SFF build, but I don't think I'm going to head in that direction right now.

*In case you were wondering what issues I've been having with the P8Z77-V LK, here is the short list:
1) I cannot use on-board video with my Intel Core i3 CPU, no matter how I set the settings. It simply does not recognize it as being there (though it does test OK on another motherboard).
2) The motherboard randomly resets from RAID to AHCI mode, forcing my RAID1 mirror to resync
3) Two of the four DIMM slots have stopped working. The wierd part is that all four work individually and both sets (A1-B1 and A2-B2 or whatever they're labeled) work with two sticks installed. Installing four sticks results in either a beep code or only two being recognized, despite the ram testing fine on my other boards.
4) The BIOS/UEFI is terribly designed and there is no option whatsoever to set a primary graphics adapter like other motherboards I have that at least give you the choice of on-board first, PCIe first, or Auto, etc.
 
I have a barely used GA-Z77X-UD5H with mSATA that I'd part with. In fact I have a closet full of stuff that I'm never gonna use.
 
MrCaffeineX said:
The mATX form-factor is appealing and might change my build a bit. I have an mATX chassis that I have yet to find the right guts for.

The mITX recommendations feel too limiting with the lack of RAM slots and expansion slots, even though I don't necessarily have plans to fill them right now, I just feel better with more options for the future.
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Based on this insight alone, I would say to go mATX. I am not a form factor guru, but an mITX board would almost certainly have no noteworthy expansion path or, in your words, options for the future. The two- and four-fold difference between RAM and PCIE slots alone can be day and night. For less-than-insane builds, I feel like single-GPU power and the state of Intel's 4-core performance make a versatile mATX build just fine.
 
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Highwind said:
Based on this insight alone, I would say to go mATX. I am not a form factor guru, but an mITX board would almost certainly have no noteworthy expansion path or, in your words, options for the future. The two- and four-fold difference between RAM and PCIE slots alone can be day and night. For less-than-insane builds, I feel like single-GPU power and the state of Intel's 4-core performance make a versatile mATX build just fine.
Click to expand...

I think that assessment is very accurate. Aside from the occasional limitation with multi-GPU setups, modern mATX motherboards pack a lot of punch for the form-factor. Too bad the mSATA idea died so young, though I suppose there is M.2 now.

I think the end goal will be to drop a Xeon E3-1230 v2 on the motherboard with the full 16GB of memory that I had on my current motherboard before it started getting flaky. My brother works near a MicroCenter and they have a great price on it. I want to get back to doing some more virtualization sandboxing anyway, but the current setup is too unreliable.

Once I get something else assembled as a daily-driver, I'll investigate getting this ASUS motherboard fixed. I might be able to relegate it to file-server duties and keep the mirror intact.
 
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