As the title suggests. No ROG boards for AMD... only one X570 board it would seem... why is it so unpopular? High end ITX? No problem, but to me mATX seems a nice size. Cases can be dramatically smaller, but still large enough to build in easily and not place too many restrictions on component choices, and still offer good cooling options. I've always built in "midi" ATX cases, but as my desks space has become so crowded, I've had my PC itself on the floor under the desk, and I'm sick of it there. Always being kicked.. getting clogged up with dust, and a total pain in the ass when I need to get to it. The only place I have is to the left, so my next build will be an inverse mATX case. That alone is a nightmare, I had decided on the Dark Base 700 initially, but it's way too big for where I need it, so decided mATX is the way forward, but choices are so limited, especially in inverse. I decided on the Silverstone RL08.. and a MSI B550 Mortar, which are solid choices I feel, but why was it so difficult to arrive at these choices? Why no X570? Fortunately the Mortar is a great board it would seem, but the choices of higher tier boards in mATX was way less than I imagined. It would seem you either go full ATX, or go with what is to my mind, the ridiculous choice of ITX... and small cases that are still easy to build in and offer good cooling are out of fashion these days. If it's just me, I'll happily go away and sulk, but does anyone else feel that mATX is a form factor that should be way more popular than it is?
I've felt that way for years - I had to go on a deep diving expedition to find Z series mATX for my coffee lake chips - trawling through foreign sites, auctions & used market places and clearance/B grade pages on lesser known retailers and, even then, they were bottom tier Z series boards with no VRM sinks. I'm an ITX main, but I have a few SFF cases that will take small mATX boards. MicroATX should be the default form factor for boards and cases. The vast majority of people rarely use more than one PCIE slot. Few use two and even fewer utilise three. ATX should be as niche as ITX, IMO.
I'm with you there @Pookeyhead, mATX seems to have dropped into a chasm and has definitely been overlooked in the quality board department. I haven't had an ITX board or case for 10+ years, with everything being mATX or ITX. There are SO many ATX board SKUs that aren't that different, and little in mATX. The other problem with mATX, which SFF people use this to their advantage on occasion, is that a lot of the lower end boards aren't full fat 244x244mm mATX with 4 DIMM slots and 4 PCIe slots. They go from 'ITX with 1 more slot' to 3 PCIe slots and 2 DIMM slots in all sorts of non standard board lengths and widths which are really mATX TBH. What I can't get is what people need all those PCIe slots for post SLI / Crossfire. Once you have decent sound on board, (or a better card in a PCIe 1x slot if required), most boards have built in WiFi and a couple of M.2 slots, there's not a lot you'd want to add. I am currently working on a sub 20L, (just-keeps teh SFF police happy!), mATX build that qualifies as SFF. Like you and David, I had a lot of difficulty shopping for a decent spec board. I'm using an Asrock B450M Steel Legend as it seems pretty efficient in its layout and PCIe slot allocation. There's a 1x slot in position 1 nearest the CPU - for WiFi or sound card A 16x Gen 3 slot is below in position 2 Position 3 is empty, why put one below where your GPU is going? It'd be a waste. M.2 slot there, makes sense Position 4 is a full length 4x slot that could be used to add another NVMe drive in a card if it's not obscured by a triple width card What I also liked is that although the second M.2 is SATA only, (and shares resources with SATA ports), you don't get the problem you would do with the well regarded B450M Mortar. On the Mortar, you lose the bottom PCIe 4x slot if you use the second NVMe M.2 slot. You are also to lose one or likely both PCIe 1x slots in positions 2&3, meaning that you could end up with just a GPU in slot 1 when using 2 NVME drives. That can be achieved in many modern ITX boards which are half the footprint!
Totally agree, especially the choice of SFF cases. I mean, we already have many 3 slot SFF cases, why not extend to 4 slots and move PSU to the front to enable mATX? (thinking of NR200) Unfortunately most mATX cases are budget cases, same boring PSU-shroud layout that suffocates airflow to the GPU. BUT, now that I'm on mATX with a fat 3 slot GPU..... I feel the layout is too limited for future expandability. Especially with M.2 drives becoming the norm. You'd be hard pushed to physically fit more than 2 M.2 on mATX. Then the 4x slot is often blocked by the thicc GPU's that seems to be super popular these days.
Maybe we need dual M.2 risers like Asus did on that strange board that was ITX+1 tall? Can't remember if it was AMD or Intel, I'm sure you'll know the one.
I'm glad it's not just me then. As for the B550 limitations, it won't be an issue. I will have the GPU (LOL... whenever that may be) and a 1TB NVME boot drive, and a couple of 2TB 2.5 SATA SSDs and that's it most likely. I'll not be having anything else. Most of my storage is on my server. I'm happy with on board sound, and I have no need for any other PCIe addon devices. All I've bought is the case so far as the RL08 is end of life, so I grabbed that while it was still available. Not bought anything else yet. I could only get the red one though, which is awful, so in the meantime, that will be stripped down and painted black, as red and white are the only options for that case and neither appeal to me.
This is exactly it. As someone who does electronics I'll bet the actually PCB's and designs are basically the same with either hardware not places or firmware changes, or in the worst instances a worse ocmponent with the same footprint. Why support different board types when you can basically do one (the top and one) and tweak it down to meet all of the other SKU's. Saves a huge amount of time and money in R&D, QC and validation testing...
I don't doubt it, Pete. Different VRMs, heat sink and RGBness and you're away . I guess high performance ITX has eroded mATX requirements in the self build market. When I started looking at ITX, Intel Atoms were the most powerful CPUs, after the original weedy VIA stuff. As soon as S775 boards with the ability to take quads cores arrives, ITX was off and away. In the decade + since then, things have gone ballistic. I know you can build SFF rigs with ATX boards in sub 20L, it doesn't feel right to me. Still too big a board IMHO
I think the issue is that you can get a typically great, well engineered and thought out ATX case with a volumetric size of what was your typical mATX so board partners think why bother? Secondly, ITX systems are very well engineered these days (cases) for the most part drastically bringing their size down on what was previously achievable so the size standards for systems you have are still all covered with just ATX and ITX. As such, why bother with matx unless for cheap off the shelf builds in the lower to mid range pre built markets? Im thinking from purely an commercials perspective here and that's the conclusion I get to so can't see why ASUS and similar wouldn't either.
I really don't understand the point you're trying to make here. You seem to be saying modern ATX cases can be smaller than old mATX cases were when they were mahoosive?!?
I know... it's a bit sudden isn't it? Take apart... wet and dry.... prime... flatten... lovely satin black respray - sorted. Quite looking forward to that actually. Trying to decide on exact paint finish. I have another hobby which is refurbishing old ham and CB radio equipment, so you can see how creative you can get with paint in this thread Anyone who makes models will be familiar with most of that though. I also like the fact that the AIO will pull air straight in, then blast it into the GPU fans. In fact, the only thing that will bother me is having the text on the GPU upside down. This will be my first PC build (for myself) in 10 years. I'm still rocking the rig in my sig.
There are some interesting Jonsbo cases for mATX but they frequently aren't really designed for performance. Still, good value for aluminium!
You can get cases where the PSU is internal at the front allowing for a ATX case that is only as tall as the MB it's self. Most mATX cases up until perhaps only a few years ago when this decline started were mATX with PSU on top and as such the same height. As mATX at this height was pretty standard with happy end users and you are now in a position where you can get full ATX in the same height, why would you as a board manufacturer waste time on mATX boards when resources can be spent elsewhere on ATX and ITX? There's a very valid point to get, one that has been mentioned multiple times in this very thread. 20l is perhaps typical for mATX. If you can get 20l cases that are full ATX, why would you want an mATX board with less expansion and features? Letsg buy a 3 series BMW for £45k after £1k of incentives and ignore an £50k 3 series with £9k of insentives of the same range position but with more features and a higher spec because it's price is higher to start with. I mean, really, who does that? We all want more for the money we spend in general. Manufacturers know this. If this means a segment gets less love as a result because of bottom line then that's exactly what happens. You can produce more of the £50k spec if your selling 20x as many of them and as such the lower spec can end up costing the company just as much if not more to produce. They still need it there to tick boxes but it doesn't mean it's going to be a volume seller. mATX in enthusiast segments from working at MSI was on the decline way back even before Brexit. I don't think we will see a reversal of that trend now.
I reckon if you want small itx does that job, if you want more from your system ATX makes more sense as mentioned GPUs etc have gone silly so if you want the highend chipset you'll typically want other highend stuff so you'll most likely have a big ass GPU and it'd cover most slots plus other cooling requirements which a bigger system will facilitate that a uATX system won't without being compromised, so I'd imagine the rationale is uATX is a mid range thing, therefore only needs mid range chipset and is well served, only the outliers users need more. I do have an x570 uATX system mind you but that is only because I wanted the ability to add a few add in cards on my NAS and I felt I might have got cornered with an ITX board, I also couldn't find an ATX board with the feature set that was on my uATX board (X570D4U-2L2T) most highend x570 ATX boards weren't as highend as that but my desires were quite niche.
It's the main reason my 4 month old US rig has the Asus Z490-G motherboard and that was a pain to source (found a Spanish retailer that had it but by dumb luck Amazon US restocked it the day after, switched my purchase to save shipping/import fees - Amazon went out of stock the day after and hasn't been available since). There was basically nothing that is high-end AMD-based mATX and Asus didn't bother to do a Z590 mATX board with decent features - the top-end mATX board on Z590 uses the TUF branding rather than ROG - and costs the same as my Z490-G with wifi, while missing some of the features I needed vs the Z490 board that had everything. It's a shame, as mATX makes complete sense for most builds. My parents build from 10 years ago is mATX, as will it's replacement be when I build that in the next year. The problem seems to be that most mATX motherboards are designed to be as cheap as possible, I guess for business use. That's great for my parents new-build but for a mid-sized powerhouse options are really limited. ITX has the opposite problem - my HTPC replacement will be ITX but finding an ITX board for less than £150 is tricky as they're all high-end, even those with mid-range chipsets. Take AMD B550/Intel B560 boards. The cheapest mATX option for both is £70, Cheapest ITX option is £120 for B550, or £99 for B560 - but eliminate the single Asrock boards and you need £150 or more. If Asus/Gigabyte/MSI can make B550 mATX boards for £90, why can't they make an ITX board for the same money? Maybe because the extra height isn't what some people want from their chassis? I have the Core V21 cube chassis that's worked a treat so far, and the centre of gravity is nice and low so it taking a hit and falling off my desk isn't likely (which I can't rule out when my mousepad regularly gets covered in cat hair).
That exact same method could stil be used though if they just made mATX the standard for boards with mainstream sockets. Lets face it, AMD and Intel are not going to give us enough pci-e lanes any time soon on mainstream platforms to justify ATX boards, so mobo manufacturers could easily make mATX the standard and just keep ATX for HEDT where all those expansion slots can actually be used properly.
Need to read the entire post and then that 20l makes sense as height has nothing to do with it with the layouts that I've mentioned previously outside of that paragraph. If the PSU is at the front of the case the height of the case becomes the height of the ATX board which is the same size as an mATX case with the PSU either above or below the board. As such, the case is the same height and the system remains the same size. Lian-li were one of the first to start this back in 2011 (ish) and this seems to be when the prime high end mATX were being sold. From then onwards numbers dropped (I was a PM for MB at OcUK at the time). So again, commercially, what's the point in mATX when you can get mATX sized systems with full fat ATX boards when you consider ASUS or Gigabyte etcs point of view on where funding should be allocated? Maybe if case designers put as much effort in to available space and design with matx as they do with ITX and ATX you may have yourself some high end mATX boards but they don't so we don't.
