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I've been struggling to find a decent Mini-ITX board that doesn't have a good number of bad reviews about reliability failures. Was hoping to slap a core i3-2120 in them or perhaps a G850, and 4 gigs of ram (single stick for updatability). Anyone here have first hand (longer term?) experience with a good Mini-ITX board? Also looking for a different case than the Antec ISK-300, as its just failed to impress over time. I need it to be small, so the new BitPheonix case that was in the TR news probably wont do, was hoping it would .

Any Input?

Not exactly long term but I'm pretty happy with my P8H77-I. The only potential sticking point is probably the Realtek LAN, though I've not had any trouble with Realtek network chips myself.

I've been really happy with an ASUS P8H61-I and a celeron G530 in a a Foxconn RM233+ case and PSU. I added an SNT SNT-SATA2221B, an SSD, and a recycled laptop hard drive. This system runs cool and quiet and allows hot swapping of the laptop drive.

vrstein wrote:

I've been really happy with an ASUS P8H61-I and a celeron G530 in a a Foxconn RM233+ case and PSU. I added an SNT SNT-SATA2221B, an SSD, and a recycled laptop hard drive. This system runs cool and quiet and allows hot swapping of the laptop drive.

Welcome to TR! Very informative first post.

I'd like to see more details on that Foxconn case, but a quick search turned up almost nothing- this thread and one on another site. It seems like the limiting factor here is going to be the enclosure, as motherboard quality will be hit-and-miss regardless; though I'd have to say I'd go ASUS if I could, ASRock second, and would make a determination more on features than anything else.

I assume that in an office environment you'd have no use for a Wifi module, but what about mSATA?

Welch wrote:

I've been struggling to find a decent Mini-ITX board that doesn't have a good number of bad reviews about reliability failures. Was hoping to slap a core i3-2120 in them or perhaps a G850, and 4 gigs of ram (single stick for updatability). Anyone here have first hand (longer term?) experience with a good Mini-ITX board? Also looking for a different case than the Antec ISK-300, as its just failed to impress over time. I need it to be small, so the new BitPheonix case that was in the TR news probably wont do, was hoping it would .

Any Input?

Please, please, don't just use one DIMM. Future upgradability be damned, with how cheap RAM is right now there is now reason not to get 2x4GB, or if the budget is extremely tight at least don't choke the CPU with a single DIMM and get 2x2GB which ought to be enough for general use.

1) I think almost any name brand board you buy on newegg (ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, ASRock, Biostar) has a better chance of survival than the junk OEMs use. Pick something with 4 eggs or more and don't worry about it.

2) IMO, newegg motherboard reviews in general are negatively skewed by people that have problems from things like other incompatable or faulty hardware without knowing it. There's a million and one things that could make a computer fail or not work in the first place and the motherboard has the same chance at failure as any other component. (maybe slightly higher considering the mobo handles all the power delivery, but you get the idea)

This looks promising:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6105/evga ... -sized-z77

For office use, I'd probably just grab one of the Intel ITX boards - there are a good number out there, including a couple with the Q-series chipsets intended for business use.

As to a case - I've had an Antec ISK-310-150 for a fair while now running in my HTPC (E5300, 2GB RAM, 5570 GPU, SSD + HDD), and it's been awesome. Power supply has coped fine, room for an optical drive and 2x2.5" drives, decent cooling considering the size (might want to replace the stock 80mm fan, though the PSU one is fine). Not gonna sway your mind I suspect, but I don't think there are many cases with a decent PSU included that have the build quality or capacity of the Antec.

Micro-ATX might be cheaper, even if you didn't need the expandability of having 4 PCIe slots instead of the single slot that Mini-ITX allows.

Another vote for the Antec ISK-300 (150W).
The PSU quality is key, and you won't get a decent PSU in many of the Mini-ITX cases.

We have a couple of conference PC's in ISK-300's that run Zotac H55 boards with lynnfield i5's. Graphics are half-height Radeons, 4550's I think - just enough power to playback 1080p and with drivers that actually run CAD packages acceptably. I suppose I ought to get some SSD's for them since they're slow to boot and on pretty much all the time. No failures yet, though they're less than 3 years old still and sitting in air-conditioned rooms.