The Motherboard

Mini-ITX is a cool form factor. As we mentioned already, the board carries with it a very tiny 17cm x 17cm stature. You can pretty much cover everything in detail from just this shot, but let's take a closer look at what exactly is on offer.

Across the bottom of the board we've got a single PCI-E x16 slot that will support pretty much any PCI-E based product. The important thing to know, though, is that the slot only runs at PCI-E x4. If you look in the above picture, you can see that only half of the slot is wired up. It's worth knowing before you throw in an expensive video card thinking it will run at its full PCI-E x16 speed.

Above the PCI-E slot we've not only got four SATA ports, but four SATA 3.0 ports. This is indeed very cool, but it's a little unknown how much use the 6 GB/s bandwidth is going to get as the associated cost with SATA 3.0 SSD drives is quite expensive. At the same time, it's fairly safe to say that if SATA 3.0 wasn't implemented, we would've been asking ourselves why. If anything, it shows forward thinking.

Memory support is offered in the form of two DDR3 slots that support a maximum of 8GB. At default 1066MHz DDR memory is supported, but of course higher speed modules can be used. GIGABYTE put their own touch on the board, though, and with a divider in the BIOS the memory can be overclocked to 1333MHz DDR.

Also here, we have our 24-Pin power connector and between that we've got the front panel ports and a fan header. It's worth knowing that you should utilize these before you install both the memory and the power connector. As I went to turn the board on, I realized it's been a while since I've used something that doesn't have switches on it, so I had to plug the power header into the board. It's doable with a little bit of effort, but easier if you unplug the 24-Pin power connector.