The mini-ITX trend continues to gain ground in the desktop market as enthusiasts look to make cooler, sexier and more compact systems. To an extent the shift towards more compact form factors and designs is the desktop market's response to the increasing pressure from popular mobile form factors like the tablet and the ultrabook. However, while that may be true to an extent, mini-ITX just makes sense for a number of a reasons. If you?re only going to use a single graphics card, a pair of memory modules and a handful of SATA devices then why bother with ATX or even micro-ATX. That is especially relevant these days when mini-ITX boards have absolutely everything you could need, and then a little more.

That's exactly what we have on offer today as we?re taking a look at MSI's Z87I Gaming AC motherboard. This is MSI's first mini-ITX ?Gaming Series? branded motherboard and it has all the hallmarks of a gaming-orientated motherboard ? a Killer NiC, high quality audio components and a boat-load of connectivity options. However, it also has all the hallmarks of a solid enthusiast/overclocking motherboard as we?ve come to expect from most company's ?Gaming? product lines. Despite its size there's full support for overclocking Haswell K series CPUs, a 6 phase VRM, support for up to 3000MHz+ RAM, MSI's OC Genie 4 and a fully decked out UEFI BIOS with lot's of overclocking and tweaking options.

The specifications, shown below, resemble a lot of other Z87 mini-ITX motherboards on the market. The reason for that similarity across the vendors is there's only so much you can fit onto such a small PCB and given the Z87 chipset is already feature rich there's little room to customise. However, MSI have done some things quite differently ? namely the mini-PCIe bluetooth and 802.11 AC WiFi card which gives you a lot more flexibility to make a portable LAN gaming rig ? you don't need to be tied down to an Ethernet connection, though for most gamers Ethernet is still probably the preferred option.