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Micro ATX vs ITX?

C

Chrushev

Member
Hey guys. I dont have much experience about this....

but in what situations would ITX be used over Micro ATX and vice versa?

Would ITX be even on the consideration list for a Mid to high range gaming rig?

I know Micro ATX is basically a condensed (fewer DIMMs and slots) than a standard ATX design.... what about ITX? How do they compare to Micro ATX?
 
Smaller, usually with less features, usually more expensive, still has the necessary slots to build an excellent gaming machine (PCI-E, sata, CPU and ram) but may not overclock as well due to limited circuitry. It's for building ridiculously small computers.
 
Mini-ITX lets you use a much smaller case. You can make a high-end single-card system with a GTX 670 or 680 in a tiny Silverstone SG case.

If you don't need something that small, the advantages of micro-ATX are:
- a much wider selection of motherboards, and they're often cheaper
- motherboards often have more ports and RAM slots (though 2 x 4 GB is enough for gaming systems)
- the larger micro-ATX cases are easier to make run cool and quiet
 
Just switched from full size ATX to mATX and probably won't go back to ATX anytime soon. mATX seems about perfect size wise and has nearly everything the full size ATX has except of course if you want to run triple SLI/XFire or something similarly insane.

mini-ITX seems like it could be neat, but the main problem I see is that all of the specialized cases for it tend to use the pico or w/e power supplies that are <450 watts and the boards themselves are space limited for fancy features if you want to do any serious overclocking. But for a home theater application, file server, or a basic net browsing box they're perfect.
 
Mini ITX can be used for high end gaming - as high end as a dual GPU card can go. GTX 690 and Radeon 7990 can be used in a few ITX cases such as some Lian Li or the Bitfenix Prodigy, or the Silverstone SG07/SG08. So, if your definition of "high end gaming" matches those graphics cards, then yes it can be considered.
 
As other people have mentioned, a very powerful mini-itx build is easily within the realm of possibility as of recently. You just need to pick your case and components extremely carefully as the thermal output will often overwhelm most mini-itx cases. I recently built a mini-itx with the ZOTAC Z68ITX-A-E, i5-2500k, Gigabyte 670, and a Silverstone SG05. While I found this to be a good combination of parts, it does run quite toasty at times.
 
If you are looking for highest top end performance at the cheapest prices matx is where its at. Right now the only category itx can win is in smallness of size. They give up so many features though to do it. Thats not to say you cannot build a good small gaming rig. You can. matx still just does it better at this point in time. This is slowly changing however. ASUS has that new P8Z77-I Deluxe itx mobo that can really overclock. It doesn't have SF/SLI though due to the platform size.
 
I have an iTX system I just put together, aside from only having 1 PCI-e slot there's nothing it's really lacking. I have 16 gigs of memory, 2 regular HD's, an SSD and a Blu Ray drive. I'm about to toss a Thermalright True Spirit 140 heatsink on and OC it to around 4.6ghz. IMHO the Bitfenix Prodigy's one of the slickest cases out there.
 
Chrushev said:
Hey guys. I dont have much experience about this....

but in what situations would ITX be used over Micro ATX and vice versa?

Would ITX be even on the consideration list for a Mid to high range gaming rig?

I know Micro ATX is basically a condensed (fewer DIMMs and slots) than a standard ATX design.... what about ITX? How do they compare to Micro ATX?
Click to expand...

I built a high end 1 card hd7970 gaming rig

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2268192&highlight=


this rig is pretty good but if you want better you need matx. i will say I liked this rig so much I built a second one. if you want 1 1080p monitor this is a very nice rig.
 
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