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Though unfortunately the Mini-ITX space has been left do dangle for a few years now; most of the affordable (<300 money) boards have pretty old CPUs. AMD hasn'
by formerly_proven 5y ago
Though unfortunately the Mini-ITX space has been left do dangle for a few years now; most of the affordable (<300 money) boards have pretty old CPUs.
AMD hasn't had something new in that space for a very long time - E-350/450 based boards were just recently discontinued, and that was a 10 year old part. The only other boards still available seem to be re-spins to sell of 5-6 year old APUs. These were decent in their time, but time has moved on. The E-350/450 were also bundled with crappy southbridges which consumed way more power than the CPU itself - when you see one of these boards, the smaller, fanless heatsink is for the CPU, the big one for the southbridge.
VIA has been gone for some time.
All the Intel boards are 14nm or 22nm parts, usually from 2014-2017. Newest boards seem to use the J4125 - a Goldmont refresh from 2019.
Intel at least offers some newer stuff in the NUC form factor (though at much higher prices as well). NUCs are pretty non-standard form factor though and offer PCIe only through M.2, so for I/O you'll need an awkward M.2-to-PCIe adapter with a cable. AMD really only has that 4700S kit (which uses a PS5 SoC with defective iGPU as I understand it) at around 400 currency. The 4700S seems to have ridiculous idle power draw (~80 W - maybe power management for the GDDR and other parts are disabled together with the iGPU).
There are some ARM boards now with PCIe. The RPi CM4 has a PCIe 2.0 x1, which is not a lot but maybe good enough for some use cases. The RockPro64 has an PCIe 1.0 x4 slot; the RockPi4 has an extremely awkwardly positioned M.2 slot (same PCIe 1.0 x4, it's the same SoC as the RockPro64).
None of these are great options.
- baybal2 5y agoIndeed, the number of acceptable ITX boards is in single digits now for last gen CPUs.
- 1MachineElf 5y ago>last get CPUs Did you mean "last gen CPUs"? If indeed that was a typo, I think it would be a difficult one to make on a QWERTY keyboard, because the N key isn't very close to the T key. Are you a Dvorak typist, by chance?
- bobnamob 5y agoMore likely to be phone keyboard auto correct.
- baybal2 5y agoThat's right partially too. Autocorrect is tuned to qwerty for its hamming distance data used, and other statistics.
- baybal2 5y agoYes, you are right. But my current laptop comes with qwerty labels. Never managed to get time to move the keycaps.
- I_dev_outdoors 5y agoThere's plenty of Mini-ITX motherboards which accept a socket-ed processor though. It's less of a specialty form factor these days where only VIA is participating in and something that more mainstream manufactures are making as well such as Gigabyte and ASUS.
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoPicking up a generic Intel Mini-ITX board and dropping a cheap Celeron or i3 into it can produce some surprisingly low idle powers. Around 10-11W is not uncommon, which is lower than this quad Raspberry Pi 4 board. The key is to pick motherboards with minimal features (few extra chips to power) and an Intel CPU. Intel historically has much better idle power than AMD, although AMD held the power efficiency crown under full load for a while. Here's a random example from years ago of a cheap Mini-ITX motherboard and CPU with minimal idle power: https://mattgadient.com/building-a-low-power-pc-on-skylake-10-watts-idle/ https://mattgadient.com/building-a-low-power-pc-on-skylake-1... The ITX motherboards with built-in CPUs are great if you can find them, but they basically disappeared when the chip shortage kicked in. CPU vendors put all of their production into the expensive money-making parts.
- formerly_proven 5y agoThis is a good point. AMD might actually be interesting here, at least on paper, because AM4 can be used without a chipset (A300, X300) and still provide a bunch of USB and SATA (directly out of the CPU), and if combined with an APU instead of a desktop SKU, idle power consumption should be laptop-like (there's only one die for Ryzen APUs afaik). The problem is that I don't think boards themselves are available, only prebuilts/barebones, and of course AMD APUs have pretty high starting prices right now, and lower-end Zen 2/3 APUs weren't even announced last time I looked.
- floatboth 5y agoThe RPi4 SoC has a busted PCIe controller (can't do 64-bit operations), the Rockchip one has a very small BAR size limit, so neither can run GPUs for example. The real ARM board options are SolidRun MACCHIATObin and SolidRun HoneyComb LX2K.