As much as I love the potential to put a high performance, or at least strong mid-range graphics card into that PCI-e x16 slot, I can't find a practical solution. This board will almost certainly be going into a mini-ITX case, and the strongest power supply I have found for one of these cases is 300W, which isn't enough for most, if not all, mid-range graphics cards, nevermind high-end. It's a circle which gets rather annoying when trying to figure out how to upgrade a system based off of this board

I've just built a media PC based on one of these and thought I'd share some of my experience so far. This is still work-in-progress!

I've put 4GB OCZ RAM and a Core 2 E7400 processor. It's a cute board and "out of the box" works well. I'm runing Windows 7 beta smoothly and the aero effects work well. I had read some people questioning the quality of Zotac kit but overall it's not been a major issue. I have one little worry as the cooler mounting holes seem to be slightly out of alignment which leads a slight bowing of the board with the intel stock cooler. I'm planning to change to a low profile cooler as my case (A+ Cupid 2) means the hard drive and cooler interfere with each other - I've put in a smaller capacity 2.5" drive for now. Maybe a different cooler won't cause the bowing!

As a media PC base I'm pleased so far. Putting aside the cooler concern there's one main gotcha with the mobo. The board only has a single PCI express slot and there are very few PCI-e TV tuner cards around, and even fewer that support satellite (DVB-S/S2) so you need to be careful! There are USB options for DVB-T but I'd prefer to have it all in one box. I also want to go HD, so I'm still looking around for the best component here!

I've done the build with a normal monitor and the next stage is to plug into the TV with HDMI so there may still be a snafu lying in wait!

I've just built a media PC based on one of these and thought I'd share some of my experience so far. This is still work-in-progress!

I've put 4GB OCZ RAM and a Core 2 E7400 processor. It's a cute board and "out of the box" works well. I'm runing Windows 7 beta smoothly and the aero effects work well. I had read some people questioning the quality of Zotac kit but overall it's not been a major issue. I have one little worry as the cooler mounting holes seem to be slightly out of alignment which leads a slight bowing of the board with the intel stock cooler. I'm planning to change to a low profile cooler as my case (A+ Cupid 2) means the hard drive and cooler interfere with each other - I've put in a smaller capacity 2.5" drive for now. Maybe a different cooler won't cause the bowing!

As a media PC base I'm pleased so far. Putting aside the cooler concern there's one main gotcha with the mobo. The board only has a single PCI express slot and there are very few PCI-e TV tuner cards around, and even fewer that support satellite (DVB-S/S2) so you need to be careful! There are USB options for DVB-T but I'd prefer to have it all in one box. I also want to go HD, so I'm still looking around for the best component here!

I've done the build with a normal monitor and the next stage is to plug into the TV with HDMI so there may still be a snafu lying in wait!

I now have a perverse desire to stick one of these in a Silverstone LC09. With appropriate component choices and careful undervolting it might be possible -- 60w power supply be damned.

The board can also pass uncompressed 8-channel LPCM audio through the HDMI port. If you don't have a receiver or home theater setup that can handle HDMI audio, you can always use one of two digital S/PDIF outputs or the trio of analog jacks.
The discrete audio ports are backed by a 6-channel Realtek ALC662 codec that looks a little pedestrian in light of the board's fancy HDMI audio output capabilities. I'd prefer to see the ALC889A instead, if only because it supports real-time Dolby Digital Live and DTS encoding, which would allow multi-channel game audio to be passed over HDMI. The ALC662's multi-channel digital output capacity is limited to passing along the sort of pre-encoded audio tracks that come with movies.

Huh ?
If the onboard sound can pass 8-channel uncompressed audio over it's HDMI port, then it can pass the 8-channel uncrompressed audio from your multichannel-games over the very same HDMI port ! There's no need for DD/DTS encoding, if it can pass the lossless uncompressed audio digitally.

Anyone know if PCI-E IEEE 1394 cards exist?

I'm pretty much sold if I can get me some FireWire going on this bad boy.

I'll trade the wifi module for a total of 6 sata ports.

I want to load a Chenbro ES34069 up, but nobody makes more than 5 sata ports (yet) with a S775 and desktop memory.

I've seen conflicting reports about whether this board supports Wake on USB. I know that the option is listed in the BIOS, but supposedly the board does not actually support this feature. If Geoff or anyone else on the TR board has tried it out with this board, I would appreciate a shout out. I have been dying to get one of these boards for a new HTPC build, but it will be a no go unless I can wake from S3 with a remote control.

That's pretty spiffy. It's great to see SFF platforms getting more competent. I personally have no need for the smallness or portability this board, so I'd likely just go with a full-ATX offering, but it's still neat.

Are there any worthwhile SFF graphics adapters that'd round-out a prospective "mini-LAN-box" based on this board? I confess I don't know anything about mini-ITX, so a host of cards might presumably fit in such an enclosure.

Off topic to this board in particular, but a bit of a rant: I looked into putting together a GF9x00 system and discovered that, Nvidia marketing feature lists to the contrary, no one seems to make a GF9x00 board that supports simultaneous output over HDMI and DVI. You can run one or the other but the 2nd display must be output as analog HD15.

So unless you're still using a 5 year old tube monitor getting useful dual head output (or single head + HDTV out) means adding a discrete video card - which seems to defeat the purpose of paying more than $50 let alone $130 for a bare board.

AMD 780/790 and GF8x00 don't support this either. The much maligned Intel G3x/G4x do.

I seem to recall seeing dual digital outs on a Geforce4 card circa 2003.

Speaking of cases, there's always this:
http://www.mini-itx.com/news/44187554

Even comes with a slot-loading drive. Speaking of which, WTF happened to them? They were never plentiful, but you could always find a couple of models if you looked around online (Fry's even carried one for a while). Other than a couple of "slim" drives primarily aimed at laptops, they seem to have vanished from retail (though they do turn up in "lifestyle' OEM machines like the Touchsmart and Studio Hybrid)

add one of these for lovely HTPC goodness:

http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hvr2250.html

Wow, this little thing is near perfect.. It has just the right features, unlike most ITX setups living off outdated tech.

Very nice, I'm gonna look into getting out in Canada.

This board is an amazing little gem. I knew I should have waited to build my HTPC. I would have really loved to use this board.

I'd be interested to see a htpc build based on this (or something similar) in the next system guide.

interesting. you can potentially use this to make a competent gaming system that's slightly larger than a shoebox. it would be cramped with questionable cooling, but it's certainly doable.

Thanks to the commentors for pointing out the Silverstone case. I hope that TR does a comparison of available mini-itx cases capable of providing expansion room for SFF system boards.

Thanks to the other commentors for mentioning the mini-itx case by Silverstone. Hope that TR will do a comparison of the limited number of cases available for the various SFF system boards.

Zotac board + Silverstone mini-ITX case = powerful awesomeness in a tiny package. The WiFi-less version of this board is currently available on a combo deal at Newegg with the Silverstone case. The Silverstone case can handle a HD4850 as well.

Cool, thanks for the write-up! It's nice to see a smaller company like Zotac push new configurations out and the GF9300 is much better than the GF7000s. You mentioned that you put a GTX 280 in it and I was hoping for a picture though just for laughs. Can you take one pretty please? :D

One thing I've seen mentioned is that the chipset heatsink and therefore chipset can get quite hot on this board (I believe it was this board.) Did you check chipset temps at all, or test it in an enclosure? Running all passive would be great but I think you'd need at least one fan to provide airflow through the system.