Mini itx articles

The PC-Q25 vows to be Lian-Li's most advanced Mini-ITX offering yet. The case has plenty of room for high-end hardware, including full-length graphics cards. Besides catering to gamers, the chassis also attempts to woo media buffs with support for five 3.5" hard drives and some impressive cooling options.

The PC-Q25 has received hot-swap connectors to quickly load hard drives, tool-less side panels for faster access and it lost the 5.25" optical drive bay. The new arrival certainly appears to be a more modern enclosure, but it also seems to have a few drawbacks that we'll flesh out right up next.

Built around Intel's H61 chipset, the DH61AG may not seem all that exciting on the surface. However, if you gaze a little deeper, you'll see this is no ordinary Mini-ITX motherboard, as it supports the low profile variant known as Thin Mini-ITX.

The board utilizes Sandy Bridge's integrated graphics engine with support for HDMI and DVI-I, which is complemented by flexible eDP or LVDS flat panel display support. The combination of low height components, premium features and an external power supply make this the perfect solution for affordable all-in-one desktops or tiny HTPC systems.

Today we're looking at a new breed of Mini-ITX motherboards from Asrock called the Z68M-ITX/HT and A75M-ITX. The former is an Intel Z68 board that supports Intel's second-generation Core processors, while the latter utilizes AMD A75's chipset to support Socket FM1 processors, namely the new Fusion A-series desktop APUs.

To spice things up we've selected Intel and AMD's $140 CPU offerings. In other words, this review will also serve as a comparison for the Core i3-2120 and AMD A8-3850.