# Recommendations for Mini ITX motherboard



## balanga (Oct 21, 2019)

I'd like some recommendations for a Mini ITX motherboard, a used one , a few years old. I already have a Fractal NODE 304 case and a Corsair RM650 PSU. I'm on a limited budget, so am interested in getting something which will work with what I already have for the lowest price.


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## SirDice (Oct 21, 2019)

I have a MSI MS-7835 for a couple of years, I'm very happy with it. It has an integrated Intel Atom that's passively cooled. It's almost 6 years old now.


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## balanga (Oct 21, 2019)

How does that compare with a Commell LV67M Motherboard



			COMMELL LV-67M Mini-ITX Support 4th generation Intel® Core™ i7/i5/i3 Mobile Processor


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## SirDice (Oct 21, 2019)

Not sure about your country but I have a couple of hardware shops (Alternate, Informatique) that sell so-called "upgrade sets" in various price ranges. Those "sets" contain a mainboard, CPU and memory. They're great to use as a basis for a new PC.


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## 6502 (Oct 21, 2019)

If the CPU is not too slow: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ASUS-E45M1-I-DELUXE-NEW/122942437913

More info: https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/E45M1I_DELUXE/specifications/


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## shepper (Oct 22, 2019)

Embedded solutions tend to be cost effective and these used to be around $140USD.  If your goal is a desktop:
ASRock-J5005
Intel is having supply problems which I think accounts for rising prices
AMD has a SoC V1000 that is starting to hit the market in various ITX iterations if you can wait

If you are planning a low power net appliance/server, there are some ARM based mini-itx boards
ARM Mini-ITX


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## Mjölnir (Aug 14, 2020)

Off-topic but somehow related:  I found it hard to find a mini/micro server chassis/cases of good quality.  This one seems to be one of the better ones.


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## olli@ (Aug 14, 2020)

mjollnir said:


> Off-topic but somehow related:  I found it hard to find a mini/micro server chassis/cases of good quality.  This one seems to be one of the better ones.


(It might make sense to open a separate thread for this.)

The problem with small server chassis is that they usually contain compact power supplies with small fans, often 6 cm, sometimes even 4 cm. And these are usually loud and/or have a nasty high-pitched sound. Might be okay if you put them in a server room, but definitely not okay for the living room, home office or similar.

For the server in my home office I opted to use a mini tower with standard ATX power supply (with a silent 14 cm fan), but put a mini-ITX mainboard (*) in it with low power consumption. Thankfully, mini-ITX, micro-ATX and similar SFF boards are upwards-compatible to standard ATX boards.

If you want to go even smaller, Raspbery-Pi and similar comes to mind. Of course it depends on what actual tasks the machine is going to perform – For example, if you need high I/O bandwidth, a Raspberry-Pi is _not_ going to make you happy, unfortunately.

――――
(*) It’s a Gigabyte H77N-WiFi. Nice little board with dual GbE network, and one PCIe slot if you need 10 GbE, additional SATA ports or whatever. I’ve put 16 GB RAM and an Intel i3-3225 on it that uses very low power when idle, but delivers sufficient performance when under load.


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## ralphbsz (Aug 15, 2020)

My server is in a Lian-Li Q25 chassis. Takes a Mini-ATX motherboard, has room for 5 (!) 3.5" disks, and best of all a standard size power supply, and an extra 12cm fan. I went for a relatively quiet and slow spinning case fan, and a high-quality power supply. In theory, the disks should be hot swappable, but the way I have the server sitting on a bookshelf, I need to uncable it to get to the side that has the disks.

P.S. Just saw that model is not available any longer, but there seems to be a successor called Q50, which takes fewer disks.


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## roper (Aug 15, 2020)

I have a couple that are adequate and that I'm pleased with. A fanless, low power workstation has Asrock N3150-ITX SoC motherboard which was less than $90 a couple years ago. It serves well for general web browsing, torrenting, mail reading but probably wouldn't stand up to much more than light gaming. A Gigabyte GA-J1900N-DV3 SoC motherboard is doing well as a gateway for lan routing, samba server and playing media on my tv. I think it was less than $80 several years ago.


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