KONTRON 986LCD-M/mITX (for Core Duo/Core Single) [without CF-slot, but with PCI-E]
| 31.10.2007 A really good feature rich board. I have used this in a mediacenter, where it performed very good. The bundled cooler performs well (but kinda noisy) although it wouldnt be a shame if it had been copper instead of aluminum, especially if youre going to use this in a tight configuration, and still need silent operation. One of the problems I encountered with the board was getting the SPDIF in/out header that was on the motherboard in use. The header is not standard 1mm spacig DIL, it was 0.8mm or something like that. I cut up a IDE cable for 2.5" hdd's and soldered CINCH plugs on the cables, and voila, working COAX SPDIF input and output. All in all very recommendable board. Pros: Fast Extremely feature rich including: Dual Bios (you can tweak almost every bit of the bios) PCIe x16 and regular PCI Tons of connectors (RS232, USB etc) 3 x 1Gbit Ethernet (yessir) Cons: Rather noisy bundled cooler (adjust speed in bios, and all is good, but this means higher temp) SPDIF header has to be built yourself, or bought from Kontron for the price of a small country. Since its so crammed with components and stuff, cabeling in a small case can be hard (but not impossible, so maybe only ½ a con ;)