I was reading about a i5 mitx mobo and thought of an idea but I need a mobo a little bit smaller than mitx that has core 2 duo or better socket and a slot for a good gpu. Any ideas? Thanks.
There are no motherboards to my knowledge which have both support for a LGA775 or AM2 or better CPU and a foot print smaller than mITX. VIA do produce nano-ITX, pico-ITX and have recently announced Mobile-ITX and Nvidia have there yet-to-be-released Tegra board, but none of these have any support for drop in CPUs or additional graphics drivers. mITX is as good as you are going to get, and it is pretty small, like shockingly so. You don't quite understand what 17cm x 17cm is until you hold one in your hands. Laz
Below mITX there's nano-ITX and pico-ITX. Not sure if there are any nITX boards with LGA775, although pITX are probably all integrated low-power CPU's because there's no room for a normal socket on a board that measures 10cmx7.2cm What are you trying to put this into? Sounds a little ambitious.
I think the smallest mobo you can get that will also take a high end gpu is mitx, something like the ZOTAC GeForce 9300-ITX Now if you are planning to put a huge card in it, then I dont see the need to go as small as pico or nano.
Most nano-ITX can do SATA with no problems, but as for a high end GPU... well, given the existence of the Mini-PCI socket on a few of the boards, you might be able to obtain the awesome performance of a 8500 GT...
Yer to fix the big gpu in the way I was going to use a product I just assumed someone would have made by now but no one has so that just kinda screwed my idea. ANywho whats the smaallest cheapest mobo that can run windows 7 decently?
The problem with matching high-end GPUs with mITX (and smaller?) is that most people seem to forget that the GPU requires a large, full-sized PSU. It amazes me to witness a person paying a premium for a small-sized motherboard and then installing it into a micro ATX case because of the PSU space and cooling requirements. Best to save your money and buy a micro ATX motherboard to begin with. I think I might have the most powerful "smaller than a mITX board" ever made. It is a Kontron J-Rex 3.5" form factor industrial board with a 1.8GHz Pentium M CPU. It cost $1,100 when it was new (it was given to me by Kontron). The point here is that if you find your tiny hot rod then expect to pay a small fortune for it.
You had to say it didn't ya, now the fun has gone. i love seeing when something goes wrong like jamming a 120.2 rad into a shuttle and expecting the PSU to fit.
No doubt that plugging a GTX295 into a tiny motherboard is fun and sexy (more like attaching the MB to the graphics card) but the fantasy soon dies when reality sets in. I have instead used low-powered, air-cooled graphics cards like a 7600GS that a picoPSU will power with relative ease. Not a gaming box but it certainly is a bump up from onboard graphics.
I don't mind the price and i've decided against a graphics card. Whats a nan itx or smaller mobo with a decent cpu?
If money is no object..... A Commell LS-373 with an Intel T9900 CPU. That would give you a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo (Mobile) w/ 6MB cache in a motherboard the size of a 3.5" hard drive. Australian Commell Distributor The only Nano-ITX I own is a VIA NX15000. I like it but I don't really use it much. VIA just recently announced they were finally matching their Nano CPU to a Nano-ITX form factor board (It gets confusing). That should be a nice package when it becomes available. I really, really like my Nano-powered mITX board.
You'll probably have to contact them for a quote. In the US I found one for $376. The T9900 CPU goes for $480-560.
After a bit of searching I found some lovely accessories for that board, maybe you shouldn't give up on a graphics card after all... A Mini PCI-E to PCI-E converter allows you to attach a Low profile 9500GT to that newly found slot. (of course, good luck finding a x1 card, that is the only one I know of.) Alternatively you could attach any PCI-E graphics card if you cut out the back of the slot. You would probably want to go 9600GT or 4770 at the highest though as otherwise you will find PCI-E bandwidth is your bottleneck. Then that board is just crying out for a full cover block, including the CPU... Man... tiny computer. Edit: Oh yeah, here is my source for small PSUs in Australia. Wait... looking at that board, HOW DO YOU POWER IT?
