Asus And DFI: Core i7 Micro-ATX Motherboards Compared : ATX Without The Waste

With support for full-sized components and up to four expansion cards, the Micro ATX format has always been more than adequate for the majority of high-end builds. Yet while enthusiasts have typically cited inadequate quality or design as the primary reason for not considering this option, manufacturers have cited lack of demand as a reason for not putting their best efforts into a board this small. A few attempts by manufacturers to win loyalty among space-conscious enthusiasts have mostly been rejected by a market that maintained its traditional view of the former problems.

The popularity of Micro ATX portable gaming enclosures is finally starting to break the cycle of negative assumptions as customers are forced to make a decision about what hardware to put inside. Current top products are undoubtedly as feature-laden as many of their full-sized counterparts, incorporating high-end devices and support for even the largest dual-slot graphics cards in CrossFire and SLI. Always a target of upper-range Micro ATX motherboard sales, professional media and home theater enthusiasts may instead choose to load up to three media-centric devices in addition to a single-slot graphics card. With this much flexibility, confessing that they don’t actually need more expansion room could be the hardest problem for many builders.

Yet few of us will even consider smaller devices until we can see that they function as well in every respect as the larger parts they replace, so today we’ll compare these against the fastest of our full-ATX samples. Before we go into the details of that test, let’s take a closer look at the features we so eagerly endorsed.


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PhotoFast G-Monster-V5 256GB SSD Sneak Peek

There is a ton of activity in the solid state drive market, with new products announced seemingly on a weekly basis. One SSD product that generated some buzz out at Computex last month was the PhotoFast G-Monster-V5, due to its claimed 270MB/s read and write speeds. It wasn't available back then, however, we just got our hands on one for a quick evaluation and thought we'd give you a sneak peek at the goods.

We'll be doing a more thorough evaluation of this drive in the days ahead, but we wanted to show you some pictures and preliminary numbers to whet your appetites.




The drive you see here is a $999, 256GB PhotoFast G-Monster-V5. To an OS, the drive appears as a single volume, but internally the drive is comprised of a trio of components--two 128GB SSD modules and an adapter that "converts" the drive to a RAID 0 array. Each of the SSD modules is equipped with 128GB of Samsung MLC NAND flash memory, 64MB of Elpida cache memory (128MB total), and its own Indilinx controller.


As you can see from these HD Tach and ATTO benchmark results, the drive definitely puts up some impressive scores, in terms of reads and writes. According to ATTO, once the drive reached the 512K transfer size mark, it offers about 262MB/s reads and writes. And in the HD Tach test reads and writes are both in the 225 - 229MB/s range.

We'll be working with the drive for the next few days and will update you all with more information when we're done with our evaluation.

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