Thin ITX has interested me although its pretty much impossible to get one with modern specs: namely an 8th gen Intel CPU (i would totally be down for AM4 but that's even less of a thing). There is one board that you could buy right now: The ASUS PRIME H310T. This is probably good enough, but it has some issues/things that are worse than the motherboard I'm talking about, the GA-IMB310TN :
Of course, with a prebuilt you're getting done in on price, especially without a GPU. For now I've just looked at one sku: Aquado® Slim PC EOX VESA P54-SSD Fanless v0818 (sorry about the google cache, they've gone on holiday and turned off their website, because its 2018)
after some brief googling, i came up with the following pricing:
...yeowch. Now, I haven't looked at any of the other options, (if you want to make sure you look at a coffee lake sku instead of a skylake one, definitely didn't make that mistake hehe) but that certainly looks like paying £200/$258 (we'll give em £50 for cooling, it is fanless even if it is 35w) not including delivery for (basically) a motherboard. the prebuilt tax is real
. Granted, this would probably be a decent gaming rig if you chucked a 750ti or maybe 1050(ti even) in there (ignoring the case space issue), and hell even a decent sff offering at 37x307x190 mm and 1.2 liters but not worth the price.
Now, why have I written a few paragraphs about this? Uhhh....... well, I'm not entirely sure. Its partially for fun, partially because I think you guys will find it interesting, minutely because it'd be cool if someone bought one (no pressure tho, I certainly wouldn't buy it at that insane price point), or maybe even someone to see it who works at gigabyte/is otherwise able to get this available standalone (or even in a bundle with ram or cpu) because I would buy it in a heartbeat standalone at under £130, a bit above the price point of the ASUS.
- no PCIe slot, so you'd probably have to use a m.2 to PCIe adapter, which is a bit dodgy, and the 2280 slot is facing the wrong way which may be an issue, i have no idea how flexible those risers are. also convenience
- green pcb
- 2 pin power as opposed to the Gigabytes 4
- The specs page is a bit weird: it says 2133mhz ram (as opposed to 2666 on the asus), but the memory support page says up to 2666mhz. the prebuilt contains 2400.
- 2 M.2 slots, one for WiFi one for M key PCIe or sata ssd.
- dual gigabit ethernet, as opposed to just 1 on the ASUS. Gigabyte has Intel, ASUS has Realtek, but hell if I know what the difference is.
- it has a buttload (4) of serial port headers... for some reason
Of course, with a prebuilt you're getting done in on price, especially without a GPU. For now I've just looked at one sku: Aquado® Slim PC EOX VESA P54-SSD Fanless v0818 (sorry about the google cache, they've gone on holiday and turned off their website, because its 2018)
after some brief googling, i came up with the following pricing:
...yeowch. Now, I haven't looked at any of the other options, (if you want to make sure you look at a coffee lake sku instead of a skylake one, definitely didn't make that mistake hehe) but that certainly looks like paying £200/$258 (we'll give em £50 for cooling, it is fanless even if it is 35w) not including delivery for (basically) a motherboard. the prebuilt tax is real
. Granted, this would probably be a decent gaming rig if you chucked a 750ti or maybe 1050(ti even) in there (ignoring the case space issue), and hell even a decent sff offering at 37x307x190 mm and 1.2 liters but not worth the price.Now, why have I written a few paragraphs about this? Uhhh....... well, I'm not entirely sure
. Its partially for fun, partially because I think you guys will find it interesting, minutely because it'd be cool if someone bought one (no pressure tho, I certainly wouldn't buy it at that insane price point), or maybe even someone to see it who works at gigabyte/is otherwise able to get this available standalone (or even in a bundle with ram or cpu) because I would buy it in a heartbeat standalone at under £130, a bit above the price point of the ASUS.
