VIA Epia M9000 Mini-ITX Motherboard

Oh man, you have GOT to see the size of this motherboard.

"The VIA EPIA M-Series Mini-ITX Mainboard is a revolutionary, ultra-compact x86 platform optimized for today's killer digital applications. At just 17cm x 17cm, Mini-ITX is the world's smallest native x86 mainboard platform, and is fully compatible with Microsoft® and Linux Operating Systems. "

Not exactly a whole lot of room for expansion (i.e 1 PCI, 1 DIMM, etc) but that's not exactly the point when you realise that the thing is 17cm squared!!! The applications for a motherboard as small as this are staggering, both in terms of building all kinds of weird and wonderful case mods (do I hear the toaster mod, anyone? Anyone?) but also in terms of building a multimedia PC system for use in the living room that's a nice, neat, small box.

We are not talking about an overclockers dream here. We are not talking about a tweakster's haven. But this board doesn't try to be. What it tries to be is small physically and it IS. Rated for anything as low as an 80W PSU, this little beauty could be the basis for a fine DVD / DivX / surround sound decoder. Its even got an integrated Mpeg-2 hardware decoder! Just add RAM, HDD and maybe one of those all in one DVD-ROM+CD-RW combos and we are away!

Reviewed here.