[HH] "thin" Mini-ITX motherboard form factor

[Tom Metro]

A Lifehacker article on building your own all-in-one PC (i.e.
motherboard and display in one enclosure; I was surprised to see you can
buy off-the-shelf enclosures for this) alerted me to the existence of a
"thin" Mini-ITX motherboard form factor that Intel is promoting:

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/hardware-developers/thin-mini-itx.html


As far as I can tell, it is a mundane Mini-ITX motherboard (same
height/width), with some attention paid to the height of the components,
and it uses a laptop-style low-profile heatpipe cooler. It wasn't
immediately obvious what the maximum height was and whether that rules
out use of "stacked" I/O port connectors. They describe it as
"approximately half the height of the standard IO shield."

The way they present it it feels more like a loose set of principles
rather than a specific standard.

For CPUs it says they use i5, i7, and "and other Intel processors with a
65 Watt TDP in the LGA1155 package." An Intel "thin" board I found at
Amazon came with an Atom CPU, which I don't think meets that spec.

Up to 16 GB DDR3 1600 RAM.

The board may support "full size PCI-Express mini-cards" or "half-size
PCI-Express mini-cards", which can be used for "mSATA solid state
drives, WiFi and third party TV Tuner modules."

Some boards "may support a local flat panel display via onboard LVDS
connectivity."


They're pitching these for the aforementioned all-in-one PCs (and offer
an instructional video on building one), home entertainment PCs,
industrial uses, and just general small form-factor PCs.

Oddly no mention of using them as micro-servers, though it looks like a
good format for building a NAS, or perhaps a micro-cluster with a bunch
stacked up bakers-rack-style.

It would be interesting if someone made a variation of this form-factor
that replaced the usual I/O shield with a single dock connector. Then
you could plug a bunch into a backplane. This could work for the
consumer applications, as it would allow the enclosure vendor to have
much more flexibility in where they placed I/O connectors. And it would
obviously be a win for the micro server market.


So if you were looking to build your own (big) tablet or laptop, finding
an off-the-shelf board, that you can plug an LCD into, just got easier.


NewEgg doesn't have a form-factor category for this. Navigating to
regular Mini-ITX boards and then searching for "thin" turns up nothing,
but a search specifically for "thin mini-itx" in motherboards turns up
an Elitegroup board that's discontinued:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813135313

Same search at Amazon turns up a few products:
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&field-keywords=Thin%20Mini-ITX&index=blended&link_code=qs&sourceid=Mozilla-search&tag=wwwcanoniccom-20

All boards listed that actually mention "thin" are Intel made. Starting
at $110 (w/Atom CPU), so there is a premium over commodity mini-ITX boards.

(Anyone else notice that NewEgg seems to be losing its dominance in the
area of computer parts? In several cases lately I've found products at
Amazon that weren't at NewEgg, or had no reviews at NewEgg.)

 -Tom