Hi all. Im looking at a 1155 mini itx motherboard for a small gaming rig. I will be pairing it with a 2500k and a GTX560Ti 8GB ram and a crucial m4 128gb. Any thoughts or recommendation much appreciated.
I have/had a 2600k and the asus p8p67pro which i still need to swop for a b3 rev. But my girlfriend now requires a decent photoshop/illustrator pc. So i thought id use this opportunity to build a small portable gaming rig. Never built a mini itx rig before and know little about them. So yes overclocking would be nice and i have ocing experience with the p67 pro.
Well our mini-ITX board (P8H67-I/P8H67-I Deluxe) like many uses the H67 chipset, so no OCing there but you do get as many features as standard motherboards and a full PCIe slot to use: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1155/P8H67I_DELUXE/. Even though board uses SODIMMs they are generally the same price as standard DIMMs but they lack the fancy heatspreaders. If your GF is doing big images she'll want an 8GB kit in there. Unfortunately if boards use normal DIMMs they sacrifice other integrated features. It wholly depends what you need. The problem is there is limited space to put VRMs, so even though there are boards out there like Zotac that use the OC-able Z68 chipset, the OC overhead will be lower than most are used to. If the boards don't have sound OCP protection they'll also pop as you hit the limit too - CHECK THIS with the manuf. before you OC. I'm not insinuating Zotac do or do not - they most likely do! I really don't know. Read some reviews and see what you need but mostly plan around the case you want to use though because its size dictates what other components you can use: if you use a long graphics card then you might as well go mATX for example. The Lian Li mini-ITX Q series are very beautiful, and although no the best at cooling I use the Q07 at home as a server However the Q07 is limited to only 9" graphics cards, two SSDs and two HDD.
