mini ITX motherboard

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shoehorned

New Member
The size on these things are just amazing for the type of support they give. What is a good mini ITX mobo and which ones should I avoid?
 
You really didn't include much of anything in your post, which may be a reason there hasn't been a response.

There are far too many mini-ITX boards to just go and recommend just any without knowing what you want to do with it and how powerful you need it to be.

There's mini-ITX boards that take C2D's/775 cpu's, AM2's, or even have integrated solutions like the Atom's/dual core atoms, and VIA cpu's. Some have pci-e, while others have just pci. Some take one dimm, others two. You really need to give more info for a respectable response to be given. Just because no one's responded, doesn't mean "no one here knows anything about awkward form factors".
 
Never had any experience with Mini-ITX boards. Just from Newegg though, I only saw 10 boards. Obviously, they're not very popular. They seem to have a lot of problems with being too flimsy and overheating...at least from what people's reviews have seen.

Is there a specific reason you need such a small form factor? You'd get much more support and functionality from a Micro-ATX or something similar.
 
Nightrain said:
You really didn't include much of anything in your post, which may be a reason there hasn't been a response.

There are far too many mini-ITX boards to just go and recommend just any without knowing what you want to do with it and how powerful you need it to be.

There's mini-ITX boards that take C2D's/775 cpu's, AM2's, or even have integrated solutions like the Atom's/dual core atoms, and VIA cpu's. Some have pci-e, while others have just pci. Some take one dimm, others two. You really need to give more info for a respectable response to be given. Just because no one's responded, doesn't mean "no one here knows anything about awkward form factors".
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There actually are not that many mini-ITX's compared to standard ATX or mATX, and that's why I asked the general question. It'd be different if I just asked "can you guys pick me a socket 775 mobo" with nothing else given. Anyways, if I narrowed it down to every feature like CPU socket, pci slots, dimm slots, etc, then that will just narrow it down to one, maybe two mobos. I guess if you absolutely can't give a general answer, then how about the comparison between these two:

Zotac NF630I
Intel BOXDQ45EK

What merits those huge price differences?
 
There's actually a bigger following for mini ITX than one would think. Newegg has 26 boards that I counted, not including open box. These range from extremely slow geodes and via's to mobos supporting Core2Quad's and Extreme chips. So yes, there is a far far range of what mini-ITX performance can deliver. A C2Q with a PCI-e x16 GPU is on another spectrum completely from a basic C7 or geode board.

Between those two boards, with Intel's usual higher price aside, the Intel board has 2 more SATA connections, at the expense of a pata port. The Intel board also offers a wider variety of RAID options over the Zotac. It has gigabit lan whereas the Zotac has just 10/100. e-Sata and extra USB ports. The Intel board pretty much does away with all the legacy ports while the zotac still includes them. Not to mention the difference in chipset.
 
Thank you for the detailed answer. Extra features on mini-ITX is useless IMO. only 2 sata ports are needed (1 HD and 1 optical). RAID is definitely not needed because no one will get these kind of mobos for performance RAID. It probably won't scale well with extra HD's anyways. Also no need for a gigabit LAN port

So that Zotac mobo will be good for an HTPC right? It's small and compact, and has all the connections needed to build one.
 
shoehorned said:
Thank you for the detailed answer. Extra features on mini-ITX is useless IMO. only 2 sata ports are needed (1 HD and 1 optical). RAID is definitely not needed because no one will get these kind of mobos for performance RAID. It probably won't scale well with extra HD's anyways. Also no need for a gigabit LAN port

So that Zotac mobo will be good for an HTPC right? It's small and compact, and has all the connections needed to build one.
Click to expand...

Depends on what you want from your HTPC. The problem with Mini-ITX boards is that it only has one expansion slot, which limits what you can put on it. Usually HTPCs requires a TV Tuner, sound card and graphics card, which won't all fit onto that board.
 
It has onboard sound, and you can hook HDMI on the onboard video also. That one slot can be used for just the tv-tuner, so would all this work?
 
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