H55 / H57 mITX boards: post them here

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Proneax

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 14, 2002
Messages
441
H55/H57 are the ones that have video out for clarkdale.

Of course you have heard of intel's H57 board from IDF2009:

http://www.hardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1454315

pretty "meh" IMO, with the CPU dangerously close to the pcie slot, probably pointless if you want to use the pcie slot at all.

Now, a new one from some random company I've never heard of (giada?!). CPU placement is awesome, especially if you want to throw something on there like the big shuriken and still fit it in a case barely wider than the mobo.

http://giada.cc/chanpinzhongxin/mainboard/H55/2009-11-05/12.html

 
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IMO that's only awesome if your case can support 2x expansion slots, as a single slot card usually means a mainstream card, at best, and usually at the lower end of mainstream, as well. this almost completely eliminates the possibility of decent m-itx gaming. I don't really know if cases with a single expansion slot is a case limitation or a m-itx platform limitation.
 
sabregen said:
I don't really know if cases with a single expansion slot is a case limitation or a m-itx platform limitation.
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It's more like a limitation on the imagination of case manufactures/designers. There's nothing stopping any of them from designing an acceptably small case that fits an mITX board, a dual slot, full length 5850 size card (I think 5870 size plus is asking for too much, that's twice the length of the mobo!), an ATX size power supply and a 5.25 drive (at least two 3.5 HDDs too).

Shit. Silverstone nearly has it dead on with their Sugo 5, you'd think Antec and the likes of Lian Li would step up too.
 
Proneax,

I think you meant the ram slots instead of the pci-e slot...I agree, awfully close. S-ata placement is interesting too. I'm not familiar with the company who makes these. Although, the more the merrier in my opinion.

CrimandEvil, the Lian Li PCQ-08 should be hitting the shelves any day now...

Best,

Liquid Cool
 
CrimandEvil said:
It's more like a limitation on the imagination of case manufactures/designers. There's nothing stopping any of them from designing an acceptably small case that fits an mITX board, a dual slot, full length 5850 size card (I think 5870 size plus is asking for too much, that's twice the length of the mobo!), an ATX size power supply and a 5.25 drive (at least two 3.5 HDDs too).

Shit. Silverstone nearly has it dead on with their Sugo 5, you'd think Antec and the likes of Lian Li would step up too.
Click to expand...

We are designing one that fits this description and more. Coming spring 2010.:D
(Lan Gear -> www.lan-gear.com)
 
i predict i will be buying more than one lan-gear case, then.
 
Looking forward to seeing the prototype Mattinv...

LC
 
Liquid Cool said:
Proneax,

I think you meant the ram slots instead of the pci-e slot

Liquid Cool
Click to expand...

I meant for the first link, I didn't post the picture, but the cpu is very close to the pci-e slot, with the chipset on the otherside instead of between the cpu and pci-e.

For the second board, with something like the big shuriken I think the top portion would clear your ram, unless you have some huge heatsinks on them.
 
sabregen said:
IMO that's only awesome if your case can support 2x expansion slots, as a single slot card usually means a mainstream card, at best, and usually at the lower end of mainstream, as well. this almost completely eliminates the possibility of decent m-itx gaming. I don't really know if cases with a single expansion slot is a case limitation or a m-itx platform limitation.
Click to expand...

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1372339

Double slot mini-itx case with 120mm intake fan. Can take GTX260/275/280 with slight modding and PSU upgrade.
 
CrimandEvil said:
It's more like a limitation on the imagination of case manufactures/designers.
Click to expand...
True. However, keep in mind that traditional mini-ITX design was not meant to be "gaming-friendly", so most designers still stick to that when designing a case.

Also, the official mini-ITX standard clearly states only one expansion slot. So, like most ATX cases, mini-ITX enclosures only allow for that many number of expansion slots. Two expansion slots is mini-DTX, though since it's backwards compatible with mini-ITX, it can be used perfectly for that exact purpose :D

CrimandEvil said:
(I think 5870 size plus is asking for too much, that's twice the length of the mobo!)
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Quite the contrary. I believe if you actually made a mini-ITX case that could handle a 5870/5970, you'd probably end up with enough space to fit a standard-sized ATX PSU (think 3R System Air Khan, for example). Just think about it: it could fit to the left of the mobo, and above the ridiculously-sized GPU, AND help with CPU cooler airflow (you'll have to rethink case airflow altogether, but hey...). *Major grin*

Which in turn would probably allow you to fit one of those over-sized air coolers. Add one or two internal 3.5'' bays (two is probably fine, you can actually fit two SSDs and one regular HDD with two bays) and you're set to go. Nobody really uses ODDs nowadays, right?
 
Sexy...

It makes me want to sell my new SG05 with the DFI Mobo and rebuild
 
I'm not a fan of Zotac either, whether it's fair or not I see them as a cheap & nasty budget brand. I'm basing that on seeing reviews showing very high power consumption compared to other brands' equivalent products, and I noted a lot comments about Zotac's Nvidia cards overheating. Possibly a just few unhappy customers making a lot of noise, but as Zotac are still relatively new I don't think I would buy their stuff until they've really proven to be a manufacturer of quality products.
 
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Well DFI sounds better but hopefully Zotac has learned from it's mistakes, and more the better.

Personally, haven't had any real issues with my Zotac-9300 ITX except that the chipset gets really hot unless properly cooled
 
Interesting. I thought Zotac had a decent rep, at least in the SFF world. The 9300-ITX board seemed like the defacto mITX board of choice for the last generation of intel processors. Were there just no other options?

PS Kind of new to all of this so forgive my ignorance
 
I'm not a SFF expert and only recently came to the decision that SFF is what I want from my next system, that said I think Zotac have been something of a pioneer in this area - by making feature rich boards that no one else did.
 
Nice zotac board. dont think we have to be sceptic, there was some strange 775 boards in the beginning, but they need to learn to make high end m-itx boards so there has to be some bad ones :D

im a huge Gigabyte fan, hope they show us some nice boards.
 
Greeve said:
Why is that? Is there something that stands out as a red flag?
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Look at the power management for the CPU and the onboard audio...doesn't appear to be that great...certainly not a "mini-itx enthusiast" board like the DFI is trying to be.

The plus side is the wireless.

I don't want to knock this board though...it might be awesome! We will wait and see. In fact, I hope it is awesome.
 
Steeeeve said:
Look at the power management for the CPU and the onboard audio...doesn't appear to be that great...certainly not a "mini-itx enthusiast" board like the DFI is trying to be.

The plus side is the wireless.

I don't want to knock this board though...it might be awesome! We will wait and see. In fact, I hope it is awesome.
Click to expand...
You forgot CPU placement. It's going to be incredibly tight right next to the PCIe slot. :(
 
As all placements in ths small form factor it will cause issues, but it all depends on the cooler you select, with an H50 you'd be good to go and some more coolers will appear now that ITX is gaining momentum.

Power management could be an issue for overclocking though. But the new processors are plenty fast anyway.
 
I'd like to see a high quality gigabyte/asus mITX motherboard (HQ unlike zotac and their revisions) with USB 3.0 and/or the new SATA standard. The lack of a southbridge should enable manufacturers to fit a USB 3.0 controller in its place, but what do I know...:confused:
 
Any idea when any of these boards will be available? I'm starting to order parts for a new HTPC and would like to go mini ITX. However, the only LGA1156 ITX board I can find doesn't have an HDMI port on it, and since I plan to buy an i3 530 I'll need HDMI on board. I suppose I could order everything except the case/motherboard for now and wait and see, and go micro ATX as a backup plan if it begins to look like it's going to be a while.
 
There was talk with the advent of clarkdale and the disappearance of NB/IGP's* on motherboard chipset logic.
That it'd be more likely we'll see mini-ITX boards with 1 extra PCI/e slot; alas so far I've not seen any...

Has anyone seen or heard of socket 1156 mITX boards (preferably q57 or h57) that have two PCI/e slots?
Ideally 1x PCI and 1x PCIe 2.0 16x.


Thanks all!
*albeit slightly larger CPU package
 
I haven't seen any, no, but I haven't seen any available to purchase at all either, so I wouldn't rule it out as a possibility just yet. There will likely be many announcements to come.
 
We probably won't either, unless they come up with a brand new standard for the rear I/O panel. If you take a close look at a Mitx rear panel, you'll see that there is no room for a second card to bolt in between the existing slot and the I/O. The audio jacks are usually smack up against the first PCIe bracket.

DTX, on the other hand, adds a second slot below the first one. Haven't seen many of those though...
 
Makes sense.

Anyway, I pre-ordered that Intel DH57JG... hopefully it helps proliferate these boards.
 
Yeah but the rear panel for every mITX mobo implementation won't necessarily be exactly the same.

There's a chance one vendor could remove all legacy ports & stack remaining ones such that there may just be room.
It'd then essentially no longer be a mITX board, even if the total board size is the same.

I do concede they'd have to weave some clever board engineering, & it's prolly not worth the effort :(

Yeah tis a shame DTX never really took-off, if only Intel had been it's Salesman?! ;-P
Sigh, I guess I'll have to retreat to mATX....

Mr. Perfect said:
We probably won't either, unless they come up with a brand new standard for the rear I/O panel. If you take a close look at a Mitx rear panel, you'll see that there is no room for a second card to bolt in between the existing slot and the I/O. The audio jacks are usually smack up against the first PCIe bracket.

DTX, on the other hand, adds a second slot below the first one. Haven't seen many of those though...
Click to expand...
 
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jalyst said:
Has anyone seen or heard of socket 1156 mITX boards (preferably q57 or h57) that have two PCI/e slots?
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As someone else already pointed out, mITX can only accommodate one expansion slot.

Search for mini-DTX for two-slotted solutions. Keep in mind, though, that mini-DTX is a rather new standard, and not very popular at it (funny enough, there seem to be more Intel-based mini-DTX motherboards than AMD-based, and AMD created the standard... lol).

jalyst said:
There's a chance one vendor could remove all legacy ports & stack remaining ones such that there may just be room.
It'd then essentially no longer be a mITX board, even if the total board size is the same.
Click to expand...
Exactly. That configuration, though it would make sense in some implementations (especially on Atom-based motherboards), would cause A LOT of headaches both to motherboard and case manufacturers. No case currently available can handle using the motherboard I/O bracket as an expansion slot. And I'm guessing manufacturers don't want to spend the extra money on ultra-niche markets...

jalyst said:
Yeah tis a shame DTX never really took-off, if only Intel had been it's Salesman?! ;-P
Sigh, I guess I'll have to retreat to mATX....
Click to expand...
Give it time. mini-ITX took several years to be accepted by the mainstream audiences. I remember the first VIA Epia mobos a very long while ago.

Mini-DTX is the same thing: it was created by a low-volume manufacturer (AMD doesn't even build motherboards, and CPU market share is still nowhere near that from Intel, though calling AMD a low-volume manufacturer when comparing it to VIA is kind of stupid, I know), to be used on a niche market. It will take time, manufacturers are just now getting the hang of things on the mini-ITX camp...

However, there is something mini-DTX has against it: the fall of the expansion slot market. Let's face it, back in the days you'd need a GPU, a NIC, a Sound Card and probably a couple other non-USB expansion cards on your rig. Nowadays, most of that stuff is embedded on something else, or it's available on USB format (for better or worse).

For the "normal" people among us, if you need a gaming rig, you're probably thinking one single or double-slotted GPU, on-board audio and LAN, etc. Low-end machines can even part with the GPU, so no slots needed there. Anything bigger than mini-ITX here is wasted space, really. Right now, and if the IGP on Clarkdale/Arrandale CPUs is good enough, even entry-level HTPCs can live without more than one expansion slot (and there are even USB TV receivers). Thus negating the need for the more expensive two-slot motherboards...

On the other hand, high-end gamers, audiophiles and the mid/high-end HTPC crowd need at least uATX, since most GPUs need the second slot space, which mini-DTX would loose, and multiple GPUs and/or dedicated audio/NIC/TV cards need more than two slots.

That said, I still hope mini-DTX will triumph. If GPUs can go back to the single-slot era with decent performance, the second slot might come in handy for one internal TV receiver.

OK, one last thing: has anyone seen reviews on the HTPC capabilities of the Clarkdale/Arrandale CPUs? Are they good enough to justify NOT buying something like a GT220/HD4650, the current "must buy" for HTPC users wanting HD post-processing on DXVA video? I'm guessing the answer is "NO", but I haven't seen it answered, and since this thread is all about HTPC-friendly motherboards, I'm guessing this is one of the best places to ask.

Cheers.

Miguel
 
__Miguel_ said:
OK, one last thing: has anyone seen reviews on the HTPC capabilities of the Clarkdale/Arrandale CPUs? Are they good enough to justify NOT buying something like a GT220/HD4650, the current "must buy" for HTPC users wanting HD post-processing on DXVA video? I'm guessing the answer is "NO", but I haven't seen it answered, and since this thread is all about HTPC-friendly motherboards, I'm guessing this is one of the best places to ask.

Cheers.

Miguel
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This is the only review I have seen so far (sure there is more) http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=getarticle&articID=980
 
can only respond briefly 430 am but yes I have seen suggestion that one may well be able to get away w/only arrandale CPU & IGP working in combo and not have to use a discrete gt210 etc. At least its believed this will be possible soon in Linux... I intend to try withouht gt210 intially, but I still want a PCI for my essence ST. night...
 
N should do it unless...you're mounting a Blu-Ray ISO or something alike
 
Thanks for the links, guys! I'm not at home atm, I'll check them out ASAP.

Cheers.

Miguel


P.S.: Relying on [insert name of wireless protocol here] to stream HD content is always a shot in the dark. Especially with high-bitrate streams. AND extra especially with over-crowded spectrums. If you go N, please make sure you're using a simultaneous dual-band card and adapter (A+N), which actually combines both bandwidths to stream HD.
 
I don't think it can combine both streams there would be horrible jitter.

I think it's more like use the 5.8G band for media streaming and use the 2.4G for the rest of clients. There is a lot more bandwidth than 802.11g though, be it at 2.4Ghz or 5.8Ghz because of the use of wider channels.
 
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