I got tired of the bulk of ATXs many years ago, it was a form factor underutilised for my particular use case. I started using laptops instead - I was at uni, didn't really play games anymore and was moving around a lot. I had no space for a desk at home, and my room in halls had nowhere to route cables so a laptop was the only viable option.
I remember at the time my friends suggesting I look into ITX but I was happy enough with my laptop so didn't really think that more about it. Fast forward to many years later at a new job I had one of the tiniest desktops I'd ever seen, a mini PC mounted on the back of the monitor to save desk space. What a revelation! And not Citrix either, an actual local machine with half decent enough power for officey work.
I was impressed (probably more amazed by the size to power ratio) I decided to get one myself for my home office, and mount it to the back of a monitor. I've had it 4/5 years now and its been great, takes up no footprint on my desk and minimal cabling. As great as it's been, the form factor (I beleive its Nano-ITX?) is a little restrictive, and with this barebones box the only things I could add were RAM and an M.2 drive. Integrated graphics has been fine so far, but I'd like the option to dip into some newer games, and what with COVID I've been thinking (along with many others it seems!) it might be time to upgrade to a do-it-all machine that can handle gaming, working from home, and some more resource-intensive programs for my partner's work.
I haven't built from scratch since I was in school, and while the fundamentals have stayed the same so much has changed as well. Back then AMD was an also-ran, Gigabyte were your last resort and Corsair only made RAM!
I'm excited to get back into this hobby again though, it's been a lot of fun reading up, researching and planning my build. I don't think SFF is as daunting as some make out. Sure there are some compromises, but most people out there likely won't fully utilise everything on the modern ATX platform. One PCI for a GPU and 2 RAM slots are fine for me, and I'll be cannibalising the M.2 drive from my current machine. By the time I need bigger storage, larger M.2 drives will likely have come down in price.
Another point of note, just from lurking for a while, is the spirit of ingenuity in this community. I see passionate creators here who visualise an idea, listen to feedback, create and refine products, then take the risk in bringing them to market. I respect that a lot.
