It's always easiest for me to write value conclusions when the differences in price outstrip the dissimilarities in hardware design. This is exemplified by the similarly-configured motherboards from Asus and MSI (where the former is significantly more than the latter, at least in the U.S.).

For just a tiny bit less, you could get Gigabyte's AM1M-S2H, the FlexATX motherboard that fits superbly into a microATX case, but doesn’t fit at all in the mini-ITX form factor evangelized by Asus and MSI. The larger Gigabyte board gives you two PCIe x1 slots that simply don't fit on a mini-ITX board, though. Conversely, MSI exposes a mini-PCIe slot to serve a similar function within the limited scope of notebook-based parts.
I don’t like giving value awards to a majority of contenders in one of my round-ups. But Gigabyte and MSI really do serve two different markets. The only thing bad I can say about them relates to the APU I used to test, which costs almost twice as much as the boards, but won't satisfy many of our readers. Of course, I can’t deny either company an award based on market factors beyond their control. Thus, Gigabyte’s microATX / FlexATX AM1M-S2H gets its value award for its chart-topping position...

...and the every so slightly more-expensive MSI AM1I gets its value award specific to the mini-ITX form factor.

- Kabini Appeals To Low-Cost, Low-Power
- Asus AM1I-A
- AM1I-A Software And Firmware
- Gigabyte AM1M-S2H
- AM1M-S2H Software And Firmware
- MSI AM1I
- AM1I Software And Firmware
- How We Test AM1 Motherboards
- Results: 3DMark And PCMark
- Results: SiSoftware Sandra
- Results: Battlefield 4 And Arma 3
- Results: Grid 2 And Far Cry 3
- Results: Audio And Video Encoding
- Results: Adobe Creative Suite
- Results: Productivity
- Results: File Compression
- Power And Efficiency
- Choosing The Right AM1 Motherboard
Create a new thread in the UK Article comments forum about this subject
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0 Hidebpbarrette , 2 July 2014 13:48I'd love to see how these setups do running Windows Media Center. A test using a 6 tuner setup would be great to see how it holds up. I know I had to switch from an E450 based HTPC to an i5 one because the E450 couldn't handle the stress of 6 tuners, and it also couldn't handle using a 360 as an extender. I don't know why the extender stuff was so troublesome for the E450, but it was.