Micro atx?

[Dorkenstein]

Are Micro Atx motherboards slower than regular atx motherboards? Thanks.

 

[Zap]

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: There aren't too many "enthusiast" or overclockable mATX boards widely available except for a handful. One board based on a chipset usually performs similar to another board with the same chipset. Also, if dealing with AMD socket 754 or 939 chips, there is very little performance difference even across chipsets. The reason is that the AMD chips have integrated memory controllers which makes them less susceptible to varying motherboard chipsets and design. Once again we are left with the issue of few "enthusiast" boards in the mATX form factor. What is an "enthusiast" board? Well, one thing that comes to mind is overclocking. Besides that, wild colors (which may or may not be a good thing in your eyes ), bundled accessories, extra fan headers, etc. I can think of three "enthusiast" mATX boards off the top of my head, the Jetway GDMS210 Pro (I may have butchered the model number) using the ATI chipset with IGP for socket 939, and two Biostar Tforce6100 boards, for both socket 754 and 939 based on the nVidia Geforce6100 chipset with IGP. Both the ATI and nVidia chipsets have IGP - integrated graphics, which are acceptable for all non-gaming purposes, and indeed will also play games, albeit at low framerates for the newer games. These boards also have PCI-E 16X slots, so they can take any PCI-E video card on the market up to the fastest 7900GTX or X1900XTX. I've heard DFI now makes an overclockable mATX board based on the ATI chipset.

 

[gtjr]

matx are good for sff(small form factor) casing but performance is the same as atx it depends on the cpu or chipset and video card that makes a great system