mini-stx – SFF.Network

L1Techs Overviews the Sapphire FS-FP5V, a New Mini-STX Board

As analysed by forum moderator j0rd: Lackluster I/O, 1 USB3, 3 USB 2 Serial header GPIO Traditional front panel header 1 SATA w/ a power breakout 2 M.2 slots, e-key and 1 PCIe / sata Dual realtek 1G NIC’s realtek audio chip 2 SO-DIMM slots Vega 11 GPU 4 core 8 thread CPU 3.8GHz single core turbo Other Ryzen CPU’s will be available ECC RAM supported DDR4 3200 support Quad DisplayPort Comments? Here!

Editorial

How STX Changed My View of SFF

This article marks a return to my editorial content – occasional articles entirely based on my personal opinion. These are part of a series focusing on issues in the SFF niche. All content is entirely opinion of myself, not of SmallFormFactor.net, and should not be taken as fact. For years, I was a Micro-ATX SFF stalwart. I never truly believed M-ITX could offer all I needed in a system, with lackluster networking, audio and storage solutions, as well as just poor physical design. CPU coolers sat too close to RAM or expansion slots, minimal drive expansion was available, and the …

News

SilverStone launches a $35 Mini-STX case: the VT01

AnandTech has the details on this new Mini-STX chassis from SilverStone, the VT01 (not VT101). As befitting the price it’s a simple enclosure made of 0.8mm steel (available in either black or silver) and it features VESA mounts, 1x 2.5″ mount, cutouts for wireless antennas, and not much else. It does not come with an AC adapter. Dimensions are 65mm x 155mm x 152mm (1.53L) and the CPU heatsink height clearance is 34mm. According to AnandTech the price is $35 and it should be available in about three weeks. Thoughts? Discuss them in the forum here.

News

ASRock announces the H110M-STX motherboard

While ASRock showed off a Mini-PC utilizing this motherboard at CES this year, it wasn’t clear then if the motherboard would be available for purchase by itself. Well, today ASRock is announcing the standalone H110M-STX motherboard! While John may be dubious on the use case for Mini-STX, I think there’s modding potential for ultra small gaming builds by way of M.2 to PCIe slot adapters (which hopefully will work with this board). And luckily for us, the H110M-STX has a PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slot that is connected directly to the Skylake CPU instead of the H110 chipset. Not only that, …

Editorial

John’s Weekly Mini-Rant – M-STX, Do We Really Need Another Form Factor?

This is one of a series of weekly mini-rants by your faithful correspondent, John Morrison. These is a regular series focusing on issues in the SFF niche. All content is entirely opinion of John, not of SmallFormFactor.net, and should not be taken as fact. About a year ago, Intel previewed a new form factor, as a slightly larger brother to the NUC format that they had championed. This new format was called “5×5″ in reference to the 5 inch by 5 inch PCB the board used (we’ll not get into Metric versus antiquated measurement systems here!). We didn’t hear much more about …

News

Computex 2016 Mini-STX Roundup

While things were pretty quiet on the SFF motherboard and case front at Computex this year, Mini-STX saw a decent number of announced boards and chassis. Motherboards: Asus – Various boards (Japanese article) ECS – H110S-2P Gigabyte – H110MSTX-HD3 Cases: ECS – Interchangeable cases SilverStone – Several prototypes Complete System: ASRock – DeskMini 110 ECS – LIVA Pro So while not a plethora of new products, it’s a much better showing than some of the other SFF product categories. Now they just need to show up on store shelves. Thoughts? Discuss them in the forum here.

News

Akasa Reveals Their First Mini-STX Chassis

Akasa introduced its first case for the emerging mini-STX form-factor. As we have mentioned in previous news articles, Mini-STX is a development of Intel’s 5×5″ platform, featuring a socketed processor but otherwise limited expansion. The Akasa Euler ST has cutouts for the specified I/O layout of upcoming mini-STX motherboards, with a lot of room left for storage devices. The ridged aluminium body of the case doubles up as CPU heatsink, and can handle CPUs with a TDP of up to 35W. The platform itself is claimed to support CPUs with a TDP of up to 65W. Unfortunately at the time of publishing, no product page …