YouTube celebrity Linus Sebastian recently reviewed a very peculiar Intel B150 motherboard from Chinese motherboard manufacturer Zeal-All. The ZA-SK1050 knits Intel's LGA1511 socket with Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1050 Ti onto the same PCB. The manufacturer has never made our best motherboards list, but Zeal-All has been offering this type of product for a while now and the ZA-SK1050 seems to be its latest creation.
The ZA-SK1050 measures 235 x 197.5mm so it doesn't really belong to any established form factors. If we had to classify the motherboad, it would fit in between the FlexATX and microATX categories. The upper half of the ZA-SK1050 is everything you would expect from a pocket friendly motherboard from 2017.
Zeal-All built the motherboard around Intel's budget B150 chipset and LGA1151 socket. Consequently, it can support both 6th and 7th Generation Core processors that belong to the Skylake and Kaby Lake families, respectively. The motherboard doesn't have any power connectors though as all power comes through the single 19V DC port. Finally, a pair of SODIMM DDR4 memory slots are present to offer housing up to a maximum of 32GB of DDR4-2133 memory.
Instead of using expansion slots, Zeal-All has implemented an embedded approach. The manufacturer has slapped a discrete GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics card onto the ZA-SK1050 by soldering the GPU and memory chips onto the motherboard's PCB itself. A heatsink with an accompanying cooling fan actively keeps the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti's operating temperatures in check.
The ZA-SK1050 comes with a pretty uncommon I/O interface design as well. The motherboard comes with four SATA III ports in total. Curiously, two of them are placed on the rear panel. There's a mSATA interface for accommodating SSDs of the same nature. Additionally, the motherboard supplies a mPCIe port for adding a wireless module further down the line. The remaining cocktail of internal connectors includes two USB 2.0 headers, one USB 3.0 header, four 4-pin fan connectors, two LVDS headers, two SATA connectors, LPC port (which looks like an HDMI port) for factory debugging, speaker header and the usual front panel connector.
The motherboard's rear panel is home to a clear CMOS button, one HDMI port that outputs images at a 2K resolution, four USB 3.0 ports and one JSATA connector. The Gigabit Ethernet port is based of Realtek's RTL8111E Ethernet controller. The ALC662 audio codec is also from Realtek and powers the two 3.5mm audio jacks.
The ZA-SK1050 supports various types of hardware monitoring, such as temperature, voltage and system power management. The list of supported operating systems consists of Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10.
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Zeal-All sells the ZA-SK1050 motherboard on Alibaba for between $345 and $365. Admittedly, B150 motherboards are very hard to come by nowadays. But when they were available, the motherboards generally costed around $50 to $150. The cheapest GeForce GTX 1050 Ti on the market starts at $150. A B150 motherboard and GeForce GTX 1050 Ti combo would set you back $200, which is way cheaper than rolling with Zeal-All's offering. However, the ZA-SK1050's real value would likely lie with some type of AIO PC, an embedded system or a PC for cyber cafes, which are extremely popular in China.
Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
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JarredWaltonGPU Only about two and a half years too late. Darn. Can't wait for the LGA1200 + GTX 1650 Super version to come out in 2022! Price: $500.Reply -
deesider The Ryzen 3400G almost makes this board redundant, but not quite.Reply
Maybe the 4000 APU will. I certainly hope so. -
ThatMouse I was thinking HTPC if it supports 4k/60Hz thru HDMI, but the 1050ti is so outdated now!Reply -
bit_user Reply
My sense is that it was created for a specialized product (e.g. console, all-in-one PC, etc.), and now they're selling off some overstock/replacement parts. The non-stardard form factord and weird connector configuration is just screaming this. It's even possible they used it for some kind of video surveillance (facial recognition) appliance, since a GTX 1050 Ti packs nearly 2 TFLOPS of compute power.JarredWaltonGPU said:Only about two and a half years too late. Darn. Can't wait for the LGA1200 + GTX 1650 Super version to come out in 2022! Price: $500.
If the part is being sold in very low volume and as a repair part, then the inflated price is justified. If it's just overstock, then maybe they're starting high and trying to find what price the market would support.
In either case, it'd be interesting to know how much lag exists between the US and Chinese markets. My sense is that they get new products about the same time as we do, but maybe it takes 6 months or more for cost-reduced models to start ramping the volumes in their market. For sure, a GTX 1050 Ti is not as obsolete there, as it is here. -
bit_user Reply
The 1050 Ti is normally a 75 W GPU. Cooling it with that size of cooler means the fan will ramp up to rather high RPMs. Sure, you could throttle back the clock speeds, but I still think it's not ideal for HTPC.ThatMouse said:I was thinking HTPC if it supports 4k/60Hz thru HDMI, but the 1050ti is so outdated now!
As for the GPU's age, the GTX 1650 is only about 20% faster, though it burned about 20% more power in gaming benchmarks. So, depending on your priorities (e.g. cost, power, heat), the GTX 1050 Ti could still make more sense. -
watzupken Personally I feel this board is a fail. Right off the bat, the cost is a turnoff. Secondly, its not a small board from the picture. For the built in GTX 1050 TI, you lose all the PCIE ports that you normally get on a MATX board, and even the RAM slots are down to 2 Sodimm slots which again will add up to the cost (since Sodimm tend to cost more than an equivilent desktop ram). It is a niche product, and I feel there are too many compromises with this board to make it attractive.Reply -
Chung Leong Replybit_user said:My sense is that it was created for a specialized product (e.g. console, all-in-one PC, etc.), and now they're selling off some overstock/replacement parts.
ATM perhaps? Some of them use facial recognition nowadays. Soldering the GPU onto motherboard would help prevent tampering. -
OldNoobette Reply
So basically......Admin said:The ZA-SK1050 is a very interesting Intel B150 motherboard from Chinese motherboard maker Zeal-All.
This Intel LGA1151 Motherboard Comes With An Embedded GeForce GTX 1050 Ti : Read more
It's a very thick Laptop motherboard :unsure: :sneaky: ;) :p -
soloza ADLINK Technology have that already and it supports up to a Quadro P5000.Reply
https://www.adlinktech.com/Products/Industrial_Motherboards_SBCs/MicroSTX_Motherboard/AMSTX-CF_Series?Lang=en -
OldNoobette Reply
I just realized that this would make a great mod for an old PS3 fatty case. OR an old XBOX caseAdmin said:The ZA-SK1050 is a very interesting Intel B150 motherboard from Chinese motherboard maker Zeal-All.
This Intel LGA1151 Motherboard Comes With An Embedded GeForce GTX 1050 Ti : Read more