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If I want to go above an Atom or Core 2 Duo, does anyone know of vendors who make PCs smaller than a mini-ITX or micro-ITX?
Thanks.

Pico-ITX and Nano-ITX are both smaller, but good luck finding any pre-built system that doesn't use an Atom or similar processor with those. I just don't think those form factors are capable of delivering the necessary power for anything in, for example, the Sandy Bridge family. Apple's most recent Mac Mini is pretty small, and uses Core i5/i7 CPUs. I'm not immediately aware of any direct, cheaper competitors for it though (that don't use Atom or Bobcat chips). Someone else can probably chime in on that.

ASRock makes "mini" PC's with Sandy Bridge mobile CPUs. I have no experience with using them though. Zotac has one mainstream mini PC with a SB mobile CPU and a more "high performance" model with a SB ULV desktop CPU and GeForce GT430 graphics.

Thanks for the pointers. I will take a look at your suggestions.

Did you see this on the front page?

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/22875

The pico-itx and nano-itx are all based on VIA CPUs, which are relatively weak and best left to embedded systems.

absurdity wrote:

Did you see this on the front page?

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/22875

The pico-itx and nano-itx are all based on VIA CPUs, which are relatively weak and best left to embedded systems.

How does that help the OP?

i dint think that anyone would go smaller then a smaller than mini-ITX or micro-ITX boards lol !

I think DPete's link to the NUC article is what you're looking for. At that size you would have no choice but to use a mobile CPU, due to power requirements and heat dissipation. Whatever you get would likely be a fully custom offering from the board partner, with the CPU already embedded.

Zotac has a cheaper version of the giga (linked in one of my earlier posts) which strips the discrete graphics and trades the blu-ray drive for a DVD drive. Looks to be about $200 less than the ID70. The ID72 sku is listed in my earlier zotac giga link but isn't at retail in the US quite yet.
With Ivy Bridge available and offering ~50% increase in GPU performance, I would hesitate to purchase a SB system with integrated graphics unless you need it right now. It's only a matter of time until Zotac (and AsRock) updates their lineups with IVB. I'm actually suprised that Zotac is launching the ID72 right now without IVB. I would wait for an IVB mobile system with integrated HD4000 graphics.