...and not a single one of them with an onboard DVI port. The Biostar NF61S MicroAM2 certainly has enough space to have one right above the serial/VGA ports.
Is there a limitation of nForce 6100/6150 that I don't know of? I thought one of the primary uses for an mATX system was for HTPC use. A DVI port ought to be standard now, and an HDMI port should be considered. Too bad; the miniITX board was the only one that did DVI.
Great Preview! I'm eagerly looking forward to the motherboard and powersupply reviews in the upcomming weeks. Exciting news indeed, thanks AnandTech, keep up the good work!
You have AMD mATX boards and don't have any 6150/430 boards??? It's like having a 570 Ultra instead of the 590 SLi. Come on, what about the Abit NF-M2 nView?
Have you seen the price for this motherboard? Price must be the inverse of size.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82...170-012&CMP=OTC-Froogle">Newegg page.
$309.99! When less truly is MORE!!! I think you can skip the review.
Maybe you should take into account the low-volume of ITX market and the uniques position this board has in it. That borad is prety much the most ultimate solution for ITX freaks. Consider it competes with VIA C3!!! boards at $200 prices...
Well, as the last reviewr said on newegg, this is a specialty board, made for cars, and travel trailers etc. However, this board would also fill the bill, on making a small form factor storage box as seen http://www.mashie.org/casemods/udat1.html">here (udat mod, by mashie).
However, I'd also have to agree with the first reviewer on newegg, in that, this board would have been better suited with a s939 CPU (or better). Also, it would have been much nicer if they replaced the PCI slot, with a PCI-E 4x physical slot (or greater), and added another DDR slot. Using a PCI bus system on this system is very limited, in that, IF you do use this board for a storage system, you would be limited to around 123MB/s (and if I remember correctly this system has a fast ethernet, and GbE interface), running RAID in a system with this board would give terrible results.
As far as the price, most Mini-ITX boards have been more expencive than PC based boards, however, they also included a CPU soldered onto the board, but some "specialty" boards simular to this also existed.
I agree that an s939 would have been better since theres not a lot of 754 inventory left in channels however there is no choice when choosing PCI over PCIe, carpc modders are using the slot for either a decent sound card (most mITX sound is AC97), wi-fi cards or occasionally pci graphics.
Only gfx is in great supply on PCIe currently so that would be a problem if we couldnt use our old pci with little or no availability of pcie parts.
You can find PCI-E RAID controllers, and GbE controllers in abundance. Wi-Fi, perhaps not, but it should not be long before they start becoming available. As for the sound, why anyone would choose to use a computer for a sound system, over a good car audio solution is beyond me.
I'm sure this has been asked before, but so what....
Why is it that Anandtech doesn't review other critical products that are needed for a complete PC building project?
Many times we are told which motherboard, processor or GPU is the best, but other important parts such as the PSU or the CPU cooler are never reviewed here, reason why so many of us have to go elsewhere to look at some mediocre reviews done by some not so reputable sites.
Come on Anandtech, review a few more, different components from time to time, besides, it wouldn't hurt you to put more than 1 article a week.....
Owning one of these boards, I feel compelled to share my opinion of it.
When I purchased it through newegg, I was very enthusiastic, about getting it via UPS. When all my parts finally arrived (less than 24 hours later) I pieced the parts together, and TRIED to install XP pro. The series of problems I ran into along the way, were as follows:
1) Hooked up a USB DVD/CD writter, to boot from, and before I could even get into bluescreen setup part of XP, the system would hang. I chocked this up to the system not being able to run from a USB opitcal drive (after playign with the BIOS a few times, I'd like to add), and finally gave up, and put the optical drive on the secondary IDE connector.
2) System still wouldnt make it into the blue screen part of setup (hanging before), and I was starting to get worried, until I finally figured out the SATA drive was was what was causing the issue, so I disconnected it, and viola . .
3) Keep in mind, #2 was happening during WinPE, so was in no way driver related. Anyhow, after finally getting the OS installed on the IDE drive I placed in it, I reconnected the SATA drive, and it showed up . . .
3) After about a week, I finally decided that booting from an IDE HDD, was un acceptable, and emailed technical support . . . 2 days later . . .no reply. So calling technical support, I was greated with a friendly rep, who then instructed me how to IN CORRECTLY setup my system. However, this representative, gave me his dirrect email address, and we corresponded over the course of about 5 days, until I finally found a working solution (on my own, with a bit of help from him). Keep in mind, that "Jimmy" was very helpfull, and without his help, I may have not been able to fix this issue in such a short time period.
Long story short, the SATA drive needs to be connected, you MUST enable SATA RAID in the BIOS, and in the RAID BIOS configuration, if you only have one HDD attached, you MUST set it up as a JBOD volume. If you do not have the drivers on a floppy, or do not have a floppy in your system period (like me), part of the pre install process, it would BEHOOVE you to slipstream the SATA drivers, and RAID drivers from the install CD provided with the motherboard.
Once I had all this working, I set out to OC the system, and finally arrived at a top OC of around 2.76GHZ (on a AM2 3800+ single core), but keep in mind, there is no chance of raising voltages for memory, or CPU, unless, perhaps, you hard mod the board. Also, for the board to be fairly stable, I had to drop the multiplier to 10x vs. 11x, although my memory (Corsair 5-5-5-18 6400 XMS) was able to run at 4-4-4-12 timings, at 880MHZ DDR2.
Other things I've noticed about this board and Asrock:
1) technical support informed me that this board does not support NCQ, but is a SATA2 board, funny, NCQ is part of the SATA2 specification I thought . . .
2) this system has not been stable, and running for more than 9 days at a time, and typically, it likes to crash, hang, or force a reboot about once every 4-5 days.
3) Asrock does not seem to have the driver support of other well known companies, this board was released, 3 weeks later, all drivers were appearantly perfect, and havent been updated since.
Now I do realize, this is a budget board, however, comming from using 100% ABIT boards, perhaps I'm a bit spoiled ? I mean sure, having only paid $54 USD for it, perhaps I can not expect too much ? My advice . . . would be to stay away, if you can afford at least $30 more, buy a Gigabyte board or something, which is what I should have done. Sure, I'd have $30 less today, but atleast if this were an ABIT, or Gigabyte board, I'd have the odd BIOS update, or driver to look forward to.
Had similar experience some time ago - have SiS748 running at FSB/DDR333 speeds as 400 is completely unstable, also any TV tuner(AIW or PCI) crashes the system on regular basis.
Well, one fairly cool thing is that I just installed Vista RC2 (had to do some fenagling to get the ISO, but was easy to get CD-KEYS from MS), anyhow, once Vista installed, the majority of my devices were auto detected, and installed. Matter of fact, the only device that wasnt detected, was a 4-5 year old Ultra 100 Promise PCI ATA controller (which i easily fixed by going to Promises site, and installed their XP drivers for it).
Graphics sub system weighs in at a 5.9 score with a 7600GT, but overall score is 4.2 because of the HDD Installed it on (ATA 100). I must say, I'm enjoying Vista, although performance wise, it needs a bit of work to catch up to XP pro. Games play slower, and my 3xRAID0 array that benched at over 100MB/s in XP pro, only does 78MB/s in Vista :(
Are you guys doing a review of the Striker Extreme?
I was very interested in that board. Even though I already purchased a eVGA 680i board (I was under a time constraint to get my new system up), I was wondering if I made a mistake and should've waited for the Striker to get in stock...Buy.com had it for $350-20 google checkout which meant the striker was on sale for $330. Unfortunately it wasn't in stock :(.
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19 Comments
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LoneWolf15 - Monday, December 4, 2006 - link
...and not a single one of them with an onboard DVI port. The Biostar NF61S MicroAM2 certainly has enough space to have one right above the serial/VGA ports.Is there a limitation of nForce 6100/6150 that I don't know of? I thought one of the primary uses for an mATX system was for HTPC use. A DVI port ought to be standard now, and an HDMI port should be considered. Too bad; the miniITX board was the only one that did DVI.
SignalPST - Monday, December 4, 2006 - link
Great Preview! I'm eagerly looking forward to the motherboard and powersupply reviews in the upcomming weeks. Exciting news indeed, thanks AnandTech, keep up the good work!ikjadoon - Sunday, December 3, 2006 - link
You have AMD mATX boards and don't have any 6150/430 boards??? It's like having a 570 Ultra instead of the 590 SLi. Come on, what about the Abit NF-M2 nView?~Ibrahim~
jonp - Sunday, December 3, 2006 - link
Have you seen the price for this motherboard? Price must be the inverse of size.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82...170-012&CMP=OTC-Froogle">Newegg page.
$309.99! When less truly is MORE!!! I think you can skip the review.
mino - Sunday, December 3, 2006 - link
Maybe you should take into account the low-volume of ITX market and the uniques position this board has in it. That borad is prety much the most ultimate solution for ITX freaks. Consider it competes with VIA C3!!! boards at $200 prices...MadAd - Monday, December 4, 2006 - link
Not really the same comparison, C3 boards have the CPU embedded and included in the price.mino - Monday, December 4, 2006 - link
Those CPU's are of $20 price and -$50 worth (compared to $40 Semprons..), to NOT have C3 included is worth paying for IMHO...yyrkoon - Sunday, December 3, 2006 - link
Well, as the last reviewr said on newegg, this is a specialty board, made for cars, and travel trailers etc. However, this board would also fill the bill, on making a small form factor storage box as seen http://www.mashie.org/casemods/udat1.html">here (udat mod, by mashie).However, I'd also have to agree with the first reviewer on newegg, in that, this board would have been better suited with a s939 CPU (or better). Also, it would have been much nicer if they replaced the PCI slot, with a PCI-E 4x physical slot (or greater), and added another DDR slot. Using a PCI bus system on this system is very limited, in that, IF you do use this board for a storage system, you would be limited to around 123MB/s (and if I remember correctly this system has a fast ethernet, and GbE interface), running RAID in a system with this board would give terrible results.
As far as the price, most Mini-ITX boards have been more expencive than PC based boards, however, they also included a CPU soldered onto the board, but some "specialty" boards simular to this also existed.
MadAd - Monday, December 4, 2006 - link
I agree that an s939 would have been better since theres not a lot of 754 inventory left in channels however there is no choice when choosing PCI over PCIe, carpc modders are using the slot for either a decent sound card (most mITX sound is AC97), wi-fi cards or occasionally pci graphics.Only gfx is in great supply on PCIe currently so that would be a problem if we couldnt use our old pci with little or no availability of pcie parts.
yyrkoon - Friday, December 8, 2006 - link
You can find PCI-E RAID controllers, and GbE controllers in abundance. Wi-Fi, perhaps not, but it should not be long before they start becoming available. As for the sound, why anyone would choose to use a computer for a sound system, over a good car audio solution is beyond me.mino - Sunday, December 3, 2006 - link
Well, Sempron 2600+ goes for as low as $35... seems peanuts to the board...VooDooAddict - Sunday, December 3, 2006 - link
You see any other mini ITX boards that are 64-bit capable and have onboard video with DVI and 3D capable of running vista?Compare to other Mini ITX boards and you'll see it's comperable.
I would have liked to see it AM2 with the prospect of using the SFF edition X2s and aking the PCI slot PCIe x16 instead.
orion23 - Sunday, December 3, 2006 - link
I'm sure this has been asked before, but so what....Why is it that Anandtech doesn't review other critical products that are needed for a complete PC building project?
Many times we are told which motherboard, processor or GPU is the best, but other important parts such as the PSU or the CPU cooler are never reviewed here, reason why so many of us have to go elsewhere to look at some mediocre reviews done by some not so reputable sites.
Come on Anandtech, review a few more, different components from time to time, besides, it wouldn't hurt you to put more than 1 article a week.....
yyrkoon - Sunday, December 3, 2006 - link
Owning one of these boards, I feel compelled to share my opinion of it.When I purchased it through newegg, I was very enthusiastic, about getting it via UPS. When all my parts finally arrived (less than 24 hours later) I pieced the parts together, and TRIED to install XP pro. The series of problems I ran into along the way, were as follows:
1) Hooked up a USB DVD/CD writter, to boot from, and before I could even get into bluescreen setup part of XP, the system would hang. I chocked this up to the system not being able to run from a USB opitcal drive (after playign with the BIOS a few times, I'd like to add), and finally gave up, and put the optical drive on the secondary IDE connector.
2) System still wouldnt make it into the blue screen part of setup (hanging before), and I was starting to get worried, until I finally figured out the SATA drive was was what was causing the issue, so I disconnected it, and viola . .
3) Keep in mind, #2 was happening during WinPE, so was in no way driver related. Anyhow, after finally getting the OS installed on the IDE drive I placed in it, I reconnected the SATA drive, and it showed up . . .
3) After about a week, I finally decided that booting from an IDE HDD, was un acceptable, and emailed technical support . . . 2 days later . . .no reply. So calling technical support, I was greated with a friendly rep, who then instructed me how to IN CORRECTLY setup my system. However, this representative, gave me his dirrect email address, and we corresponded over the course of about 5 days, until I finally found a working solution (on my own, with a bit of help from him). Keep in mind, that "Jimmy" was very helpfull, and without his help, I may have not been able to fix this issue in such a short time period.
Long story short, the SATA drive needs to be connected, you MUST enable SATA RAID in the BIOS, and in the RAID BIOS configuration, if you only have one HDD attached, you MUST set it up as a JBOD volume. If you do not have the drivers on a floppy, or do not have a floppy in your system period (like me), part of the pre install process, it would BEHOOVE you to slipstream the SATA drivers, and RAID drivers from the install CD provided with the motherboard.
Once I had all this working, I set out to OC the system, and finally arrived at a top OC of around 2.76GHZ (on a AM2 3800+ single core), but keep in mind, there is no chance of raising voltages for memory, or CPU, unless, perhaps, you hard mod the board. Also, for the board to be fairly stable, I had to drop the multiplier to 10x vs. 11x, although my memory (Corsair 5-5-5-18 6400 XMS) was able to run at 4-4-4-12 timings, at 880MHZ DDR2.
Other things I've noticed about this board and Asrock:
1) technical support informed me that this board does not support NCQ, but is a SATA2 board, funny, NCQ is part of the SATA2 specification I thought . . .
2) this system has not been stable, and running for more than 9 days at a time, and typically, it likes to crash, hang, or force a reboot about once every 4-5 days.
3) Asrock does not seem to have the driver support of other well known companies, this board was released, 3 weeks later, all drivers were appearantly perfect, and havent been updated since.
Now I do realize, this is a budget board, however, comming from using 100% ABIT boards, perhaps I'm a bit spoiled ? I mean sure, having only paid $54 USD for it, perhaps I can not expect too much ? My advice . . . would be to stay away, if you can afford at least $30 more, buy a Gigabyte board or something, which is what I should have done. Sure, I'd have $30 less today, but atleast if this were an ABIT, or Gigabyte board, I'd have the odd BIOS update, or driver to look forward to.
mino - Sunday, December 3, 2006 - link
AsRock as usual. One gets what one pays for. ...Had similar experience some time ago - have SiS748 running at FSB/DDR333 speeds as 400 is completely unstable, also any TV tuner(AIW or PCI) crashes the system on regular basis.
yyrkoon - Monday, December 4, 2006 - link
Well, one fairly cool thing is that I just installed Vista RC2 (had to do some fenagling to get the ISO, but was easy to get CD-KEYS from MS), anyhow, once Vista installed, the majority of my devices were auto detected, and installed. Matter of fact, the only device that wasnt detected, was a 4-5 year old Ultra 100 Promise PCI ATA controller (which i easily fixed by going to Promises site, and installed their XP drivers for it).Graphics sub system weighs in at a 5.9 score with a 7600GT, but overall score is 4.2 because of the HDD Installed it on (ATA 100). I must say, I'm enjoying Vista, although performance wise, it needs a bit of work to catch up to XP pro. Games play slower, and my 3xRAID0 array that benched at over 100MB/s in XP pro, only does 78MB/s in Vista :(
BUT Aero looks awesome !
crydee - Sunday, December 3, 2006 - link
Are you going to do a review of that PSU with respect to SLI G80 or in specific cases?Jedi2155 - Sunday, December 3, 2006 - link
Are you guys doing a review of the Striker Extreme?I was very interested in that board. Even though I already purchased a eVGA 680i board (I was under a time constraint to get my new system up), I was wondering if I made a mistake and should've waited for the Striker to get in stock...Buy.com had it for $350-20 google checkout which meant the striker was on sale for $330. Unfortunately it wasn't in stock :(.
MemberSince97 - Sunday, December 3, 2006 - link
WhereTF are the new AMD/775 Boards....