Micro-ATX in place of ATX

[Arczodian]

Hey Guys,

I am thinking of building a rig by myself.
I just wanted to know if a Micro-ATX mobo could be installed in place of an ATX mobo.
Do the screw-holes align by themselves, or should some physical adjustments be made?

And Secondly, I use an Sapphire HD 7850 with dual fans. I wanted to know if that would fit well on a Micro-ATX mobo, without compromising on space for anything else..

 

[battlefieldhazard]

if the mobo has a pci 3.0 then the size of the card will not matter its the case but if the case is an after market case and has holes for a micro-ATX then it will but ATX holes do not match with micro-ATX

 

[Hazle]

you simply just have to re-arrange the motherboard stand offs to align with mATX's screw holes. worst off, they're sold separately. make sure no extra stand offs are touching the back of the board or you risk short circuiting the build.

if you plan to add several other cards on the PCI/PCIe slots, then that can be a problem depending on the layout of the slots and the size of the other cards. some are spacious, some are packed together. adding another GPU for CF or SLI is usually difficult with an mATX, as the second card usually blocks the connectors usually located at the bottom. otherwise, a single GPU build will be fine with an mATX board.

 

[art487]

ATX and Micro-ATX boards have different lengths therefore some different mounting holes. It really depends on whether or not your case supports both sizes of mobo.
As far as the video card I have to say it depends on mobo as far as where PCIe slot is located and what else you want to install also how big is your case. On an older Micro-ATX I have a BFG Nvidia 7800 with dual fans but it is only a single slot card.

 

[Arczodian]

Well My case is whatever comes with Acer M5800....... I bought the PC 4 years ago.....All I've done as far as upgrades are concerned, is buying a new GPU and some ram.......Now I recently read that my Core 2 Quad Q8300 is bottlenecking my HD 7850... So was planning to do a shift to an AMD processor and related to mobo