Intel and Jetway have each released IGP motherboards into the ITX market. These motherboards now contain sockets to some of the more powerful processors available, paired with some of the most powerful IGPs available and put into a small enough package that people may not realize you have a PC sitting in your entertainment center -- or a very portable game machine tucked under your arm.

Jetway has the NC62K http://www.jetway.com.tw/jw/ipcboa [...] ductid=500 motherboard with the AM2+ socket, but it is only rated <=65W. That does allow for the Quad-Core 9100e, 9150e, and 9350e, and on the Dual-Core side, the Athlon X2 Dual-Core 5200+ and the lighter 45-watt Athlon X2 Dual-Core 4850e. On the integrated graphics, it has the NVIDIA GeForce 8200. Other goodies are it supports PATA and FDD along with 4 SATA connectors in RAID 0/1/0+1/5/JBOD. The only problem would be to find a ITX case that can support that many HDDs. It also has dual-network ports, six USB out the back and four onboard, and has D-sub and DVI outputs.

Another ITX motherboard that Jetway has is the NC81-LF http://www.jetway.com.tw/jw/ipcboa [...] ductid=515 which is an ATI HD3200 GPU flavor of the above board with 128MB side port memory and other differences between the chipsets. There isn’t a downloadable manual at this time to really dive into what the board is capable of or exactly how many CPU watts it can handle.

Intel has recently come out with the DG45FC http://www.intel.com/products/desk [...] erview.htm motherboard which has the LGA775 socket capable of handling the latest dual-core CPU, E8600 with BIOS version 0077. The North Bridge is the G45 paired with the GMA X4500HD for graphics to capture the best IGP video Intel has to offer. The real drawback to this at this time is that the drivers haven’t had enough time to mature and become stable. It has a PCIe x1, along with One serial port via header, up to 10 USB 2.0 ports (6 back ports and 4 via headers), 5 Serial ATA 3.0 Gb/s ports, including 1 eSATA back port with RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 support, and a Consumer IR receiver and emitter (via internal)

Questions:
Which small ITX case would be best for these motherboards. Obviously a sub-75W power supply isn’t going to cut it – or will it?

APEX does make an ITX case with a 250W power supply. It looks good, but the power supply is mounted right over the motherboard so that the CPU HS/fan will have to be no taller than the ATX connectors are high. Is there a HS/fan that short for AM2+ or LGA775?