ASUS H81I-PLUS/CSM LGA1150 Mini ITX 2XSATA 6GB/S 2XSATA 3GB/S 1xPCIe16 Dual Channel Motherboard

Comment:
Went together really well for a small mitx htpc build. Rock solid with a i3-4130 and 8gb of RAM. I would recommend it even if the chipset and board are a little basic. The graphic BIOS setup is kind of neat but limited in options. This is not a performance board, but it is good for what it does.

Comment:
I'm doing my first mITX build and this was more of an experiment. I was pleasantly surprised that ASUS did not cut corners on their implementation of the UEFI bios for this low end board. Why H81? First, I am not planning on overclocking. This is going to be paired with a non-K processor anyway. 2 SATA-II and 2 SATA-III ports. A typical setup would be an SSD,HDD and ODD. Both the HDD and ODD would be perfectly happy with the SATA-II connection. PCIE-2x only. MITX supports a single GPU anyway and I dont intend to run anything higher than a 7870/R9-270X/660Ti/760 (based on current cards) on this board anyway, so the PCIE slot should have more than sufficient bandwidth.The most important factor for me is the board layout. The processor socket is almost perfectly located centrally that it does not interfere with any components. With even a small board like this, a full sized tower cooler like the coolermaster hyper 212 plus/evo clears all of the motherboard chips and capacitors.All the connectors are still accessible even with a big cooler. Naturally, an AIO cooler would free up more space but that's a different point to consider.Unfortunately it only has two fan headers. A third would be appreciated since a typical system would have a front intake, a rear exhaust and of course the CPU fan.No wifi. No bluetooth. These are not dealbreakers fpr me since this machine is going to be connected by wire. An Asus USB-N13 is on standby should I need wifi.But why did Asus have to make the memory slot, pcie slot and heatsink yellow/gold? I know color is a matter of preference but this color scheme is a little bit harder to match with other components. Aesthetics doesnt make it go faster or slower but sometimes you have to make builds look nice internally as well.

Comment:
This board is very nice for a small PC build. I used it for an HTPC and it works wonderfully. Having HDMI and USB3.0 is a nice little bonus. Not much else to say - hopefully it lasts.