Can MicroATX Boards Do the Job?

Power Consumption Test Results

Conclusion

There is little room left these days for motherboard manufacturers to improve performance, because chipset specifications have been tightened over the last few years to reliably support increasing clock speeds at decreasing (and varying) voltage levels. As a result, performance differences between various motherboards using the same chipset have shrunk, often to less than 1% among models. Motherboards for Athlon 64 X2 processors Compare Prices on Athlon 64 X2 Motherboards show especially little variance, because the memory controller - which may have the largest impact on performance - is part of AMD64 processors themselves and thus out of the control of motherboard makers. However, Intel Core 2 Duo processors and derivates such as the Pentium Dual Core, which we used for testing these three boards, come with a highly efficient, shared L2 cache that flattens remaining performance differences. Clearly, it does not make sense to select a motherboard hoping to get the one that performs best.

With performance largely out of the picture, features have been the main characteristic by which buyers have differentiated among motherboards. Here we can look at and analyze the type and number of interfaces and expansion slots for add-on cards and memory, motherboard layout, voltage regulators, additional controllers and assess software-based features such management and surveillance tools - and, of course, overclocking options are also a factor. Even so, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to look for an overkill motherboard in the MicroATX world ; these just don’t exist (although I’m sure there would be a market for high-end MicroATX boards).

So what is left ? Besides features, which should still be a main pillar for your buying decision, energy efficiency is becoming increasingly important. AMD and Intel are emphasizing the importance of "performance per watt" almost as much as they usually do raw performance. As this roundup shows, there are lots of differences even among motherboards that seem to be almost equal. The idle power requirements of our test systems differ by 12 W or 15%, which is as much as the difference between a highly efficient and an inefficient power supply. ECS’s G33T-M2 is the most efficient motherboard in this roundup, followed by MSI. Gigabyte unfortunately, consumed the most energy, but it also offers the best feature set.

Having a serial port (ECS), Firewire controllers (MSI, Gigabyte) or an UltraATA port for optical drives (MSI, Gigabyte) may help make the decision, depending on your requirements. However, we believe that a DVI port or HDMI (Gigabyte) is extremely valuable, especially for HTPC solutions, where you might want to hook up your Plasma TV to the HTPC. Also, using D-Sub to attach a TFT panel to a PC is an image quality killer. Feature-wise, Gigabyte’s GA-G33M-SH2 is a clear winner - but it is not energy efficient, leaving you with a trade-off to ponder.

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