Skylake Thin Mini ITX?

Azuma Hazuki

Golden Member
Jun 18, 2012
1,532
866
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As some people know, building ridiculously tiny-yet-powerful mini PCs for clients is a hobby of mine. The go-to board for Haswell builds has been an Asus H81 thin mini-itx, but I haven't yet found something similar for Skylake.

Anyone know any thin mini itx H110/B150 boards? I'm itching to get an i7-6700T in one of those, with an M.2 PCI-E x4 SSD and a whacking great chunk of DDR4 RAM...
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
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That sounds like a pretty nice configuration to me. But I thought I read someone mention that "thin mini-ITX" was on it's way out. Part of the problem, I think, was that the CPU had to be in a certain location on the ITX board, as defined by a particular Intel motherboard, that all of the chassis with the passive heatsinks designed around.

Intel has their newer SPM or SMX or something form-factor (used to be called "5x5"), that is a smaller-than-ITX board, designed around a socketed Skylake CPU. I would look to that, for future Skylake builds. With the existence of that form-factor, I doubt mobo makers would also invest in making "thin ITX" boards, it would be fairly redundant in the market.

Edit: Check out my older thread, Burpo posted some nice info on it.
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2460997&highlight=5x5

http://www.asrock.com/news/index.asp?id=3160
 
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NTMBK

Lifer
Nov 14, 2011
10,411
5,677
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It's being replaced with STX. Similar idea (thin motherboard with fixed CPU location, so you can have an integrated cooler), but with a smaller board. Though some initial implementations have compromised it, by adding cooler mounts for standard CPU coolers (wasting a bunch of space) and not integrating the cooler into the chassis.
 

colorzeppelin

Junior Member
Feb 6, 2011
3
0
0
As some people know, building ridiculously tiny-yet-powerful mini PCs for clients is a hobby of mine. The go-to board for Haswell builds has been an Asus H81 thin mini-itx, but I haven't yet found something similar for Skylake.

So do you have any examples of your "ridiculously tiny-yet-powerful mini PCs"?