The Mini-ITX Mainboard is 10 Years Old
The 170x170 mm mainboard form factor Mini-ITX is celebrating its 10th anniversary.
Inventor VIA, which launched its mainboard business with Mini-ITX devices back in 2001, has released an ebook that offers some background of the technology as well as a history of memorable Mini-ITX computers.
VIA first showed a Mini-ITX board design in March of 2001, sold first samples in April and the VT6010 Mini-ITX reference design in November. The first commercially available board was the Epia-8000, which was released in April 2002 and was built for VIA's C3 800 MHz processor with Eden core.
Mini-ITX 2.0 was announced in 2008 and the first board to support the Nano CPU, the VB8001, was sold in October 2008. More recently, dual-core Nano support was added with the Epia-M900 in July of this year. Most Mini-ITX boards are sold into the industrial and embedded applications markets today.
VIA believes that the biggest opportunity for Mini-ITX in the future will be in developing countries and geographies, including China, India, the Middle East, and Latin America. As cloud computing gains traction and small form factor thin clients become more attractive, VIA also hopes that it can place Mini-ITX as a "standard platform for powering such devices."

big boards for "big" gamers and render work stations, evrything else should be small
and yes, my newest HTPC uses mini atx 17x17cm board made by Sapphire wit AMD 350 Hudson and all i can say it is a dream! included USB3.0, Bluetooth 3.0... LAN (no wifi) and my HTPC is build in to the shelf
I wish I got a mini ITX board for my HTPC, but my only problem with them is they cost more for less features. Also, at the time IGPs weren't that great on the mini ITX boards.
They range from cheap to fairly power house(in relative terms, 1 expansion card is the limit). I mean if you want, you can get a top end graphics card and I7 cpu on a MITX board if needed.
ITX is a board form factor like ATX. Made for more compact systems.
http://www.geekbox.com/prodigy/
Thing is so sweet and fits in a backpack they sell as well.
HAPPY B-DAY Mini-ITX !!!!
Nice Silverstone SG06, I had a mini-ITX build with that case and I loved it. Problem was I created so much heat with it that I believe I shortened its life prematurely. Or it could have just been my Zotac motherboard. Even though the build didn't last very long, I would completely build another mini-ITX system. But I would do it with the SG08 which can support cards up to 12.2 inches.