Two small form factor motherboard options
We're seeing more and more small form factor case options for tiny builds, and of course there's AMD's Radeon R9 Nano, a six-inch graphics card that packs a much bigger punch than its size suggests. Building a potent SFF PC is certainly possible. It all starts with the motherboard, and MSI has two new options specific to the SFF category.
The first is the B150M Night Elf. We'll go ahead an award MSI 500 geek points right off the bat for giving its board a name that's more memorable than a string of numbers and letters (we're looking at you, Gigabyte).
MSI's B150M Night Elf is a micro ATX (mATX) motherboard aimed at gamers. In case there's any doubt as to the target audience, MSI imprinted "NO. 1 IN GAMING" along the side of the board and lit it up with a red LED.
As its name suggests, the board is based on Intel's B150 chipset for Skylake (LGA1151). It has four DDR4 DIMM slots supporting up to 64GB of DDR4-2133 memory, two PCI-E x16 3.0 slots, two PCI-E x1 3.0 slots, a GbE LAN port, USB 3.1 and 2.0 connectivity, half a dozen SATA 6Gbps ports, SATA Express, onboard audio with dual headphone amplifiers, and various other amenities.
If you're looking to go even small, MSI's other SFF board is the Z170I Gaming Pro AC. It's a mini ITX motherboard based on Intel's Z170 chipset. The board only has two DDR4 DIMM slots, though it can handle frequencies up to 3200MHz.
Other features include a single PCI-E x16 3.0 slot, four SATA 6Gbps ports, M.2 port, SATA Express, USB 3.1 and 2.0 connectivity, and onboard 802.11ac Wi-Fi.
MSI didn't say how much the boards will cost or when they'll be available.
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