Mini-ITX board with integrated CPU (better than Atom performance)

[ali73]

Hi,

Just curious about this, so thought I'd post a question here.

Has anyone seen a mini-itx motherboard which already has a CPU integrated with low profile cooler? where the CPU is not an Atom (or that level of performance)

While I appreciate people would buy boards based on features and supplement with a CPU of choice when building their rigs, I only seem to see Atom like CPUs with passive (though a few Celeron ones with active) cooling.

My question isn't relating to a specific build, and just curious to know if anyone has seen ... ANY Mini-ITX boards with Core i3 CPU or equivalent AMD performance CPUs already integrated (soldered) on the board with cooling.

Thanks

[DDY]

I know are a few ITX motherboards for the industrial market that have on-board CPUs superior to the Atom, I've seen one with an Intel mobile i5 somewhere.

Silly expensive though, as expected for low volume industrial spec stuff.

[ali73]

Thanks DDY

I thought there must be something.. and like you said, premium charged for this this.

But I wonder if there were more available... these would make great little HTPC starter bundles (just add memory/HDD/OS and off you go) and wonder if the price would come down much?

[DDY]

Why would you want a motherboard with an on-board CPU? There is very little practical benefit over regular socketed boards, which is why on-board CPU boards are so rare, except for lower performance parts like the Atom of course, which, due to their physical form, low cost, power and heat lend themselves well to integration on motherboards.

It would be far cheaper to simply buy a regular socketed ITX board, the CPU and a low profile heat sink of your choice. It's practically the same with the presence of a socket being the only difference.

If you wanted to go the extra mile in terms of lower power and heat, there are "mobile on desktop" MoDT socketed ITX boards which take CPUs normally used in laptops, although, again it's expensive due to low volume.

[ali73]

I was just wondering if there were any... for whatever market reasons.

I saw this the other day... http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/bareb...9267/intel-nuc "..NUCs are powered by a surface-mounted Core i3-3217U, clocked at 1.8GHz...."

Might not be much of a benefit for end users, but can see how surface mounted CPUs would force users to upgrade the entire unit to get more power, thus making more money for the manufacturers.

[DDY]

I was just wondering if there were any... for whatever market reasons.

I saw this the other day... http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/bareb...9267/intel-nuc "..NUCs are powered by a surface-mounted Core i3-3217U, clocked at 1.8GHz...."

Might not be much of a benefit for end users, but can see how surface mounted CPUs would force users to upgrade the entire unit to get more power, thus making more money for the manufacturers.

It seems Intel are headed towards the socketless approach in the near future, http://forums.hexus.net/pc-hardware/...broadwell.html