new case

Hey if you are too concerned with cable management, cooling and external bays I think you should be looking a full towers. I'm not sure why you want to get a mATX board but I would not recommend it unless it's an office build. They usually have too few RAM slots and expansion slots.

Absolute bologna. There are several mATX boards that have 4 memory slots just like full ATX boards. I have one myself in fact and it can do anything a full sized ATX board can do.
 
What CG said. My Gigabyte B75 mobo is an mATX and comes in 2 or 4 memory slots. Same model no but different ext and mine is a 2 slot.
 
Absolute bologna. There are several mATX boards that have 4 memory slots just like full ATX boards. I have one myself in fact and it can do anything a full sized ATX board can do.

Hence the use of the word "usually".

Edit: mATX boards also limit your cooling options and have, as I mentioned, fewer expansion slots, that can also be blocked by GPUs, leaving even less expansion slots available.
 
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My board was a matx, had 4 memory slots had 4 slots for expansion had a video card a sound card andhad two slots for anything else. My next board will be be another matx. I can put a full atx in this case. Plenty of room. Looking at severial different boards. All are matx, 4 memory slots,at least 4 expanssion slots and duel core or quad core processors. Will have to see whati endup with. Wd65
 
Absolute bologna. There are several mATX boards that have 4 memory slots just like full ATX boards. I have one myself in fact and it can do anything a full sized ATX board can do.

My atx board has 8 ram slots.

If your miniboard can do anything mine can do, install 8 ram modules. :)
yeah.:whistling:
 
Hence the use of the word "usually".

Edit: mATX boards also limit your cooling options and have, as I mentioned, fewer expansion slots, that can also be blocked by GPUs, leaving even less expansion slots available.


Yes usually fits sort of and it did in the past years mostly but nowdays mATX being more popular and more of the mATX mainboards now having the same exact features of ATX (full) other than a few extra slots, that 95% of people never use you can actually find nice performance gaming mATX that will run the same CPU's and overclock nearly the same, and yes it's true that MATX ram slots can and usually are a tad closer to the CPU socket frame, you can get around this by using slots 2&4 in most cases even with a larger standard air cooled heatsink.

One advantage of something like a gaming micro-atx has would be that you will have possibly better overall cable management because of the smaller PCB area. Another would be that you can also use a MATX case, whereas the full ATX will not fit in that size case. It's not like I don't realize that overall full ATX offers the better options overall still especially with so many varying mainboard models to choose from, and different slot layouts, different heatsink/mosfet layouts, whereas within each mainboard popular brand (Asus, MSI, ASRock, Gigabyte, eVGA, Biostar) there my be only 1-2 mATX Z77-87-97, or Z170-270 to choose from within each brand whereas they will have 5-6-7 models of full ATX to choose from. on the AMD side there was and is only one real decent micro ATX for the past 5 years and that would be the GIGABYTE GA-78LMT- /USB3. All i'm saying is that it's a viable option that won't cost you any performance delta deficiencies, and at the same time same you room for cabling and also offer you a choice to get a small case. I hope that explains my "case" for mATX.
 
Yes usually fits sort of and it did in the past years mostly but nowdays mATX being more popular and more of the mATX mainboards now having the same exact features of ATX (full) other than a few extra slots, that 95% of people never use you can actually find nice performance gaming mATX that will run the same CPU's and overclock nearly the same, and yes it's true that MATX ram slots can and usually are a tad closer to the CPU socket frame, you can get around this by using slots 2&4 in most cases even with a larger standard air cooled heatsink.

One advantage of something like a gaming micro-atx has would be that you will have possibly better overall cable management because of the smaller PCB area. Another would be that you can also use a MATX case, whereas the full ATX will not fit in that size case. It's not like I don't realize that overall full ATX offers the better options overall still especially with so many varying mainboard models to choose from, and different slot layouts, different heatsink/mosfet layouts, whereas within each mainboard popular brand (Asus, MSI, ASRock, Gigabyte, eVGA, Biostar) there my be only 1-2 mATX Z77-87-97, or Z170-270 to choose from within each brand whereas they will have 5-6-7 models of full ATX to choose from. on the AMD side there was and is only one real decent micro ATX for the past 5 years and that would be the GIGABYTE GA-78LMT- /USB3. All i'm saying is that it's a viable option that won't cost you any performance delta deficiencies, and at the same time same you room for cabling and also offer you a choice to get a small case. I hope that explains my "case" for mATX.

Yeah that makes sense. The lack of expansion slots should only matter if you ever want to go SLI or you have more than 2 expansion cards you want to use, since most mATX boards only have 2 PCIex1 slots and 2 PCIex16 slots. That also will be blocked when using Dual cards, which would leave you with only 1 usable PCIex1 slot (or 0 if you have 2 GPUs), unless you have 2 PCIex16 and only one PCIex1, which would actually allow for all of them to be used even with 2 GPUs installed. Either way, it's 1 or 0. That's basically why I dislike mATX boards for gaming builds. That and the limited cooling options available, not only because of the RAM and GPU proximity, but also because of the thin cases they fit in. You would never have those kind of problems in a full tower.

I also can understand that some people have a limited space to place their rigs, making mATX cases the only option. If that's not the case, I'd stick to ATX boards.
 
It's not so much about limited space but more about as technology evolves, and things get smaller and thinner including the smartphone you post from sometimes in this very forum, and its it's about equality of power within a smaller frame. Hey, I have built many ITX systems that would blow your mind for customers. If you want a heavy anvil sitting in your room with a full tower case, with 3-4 extra PCie/PCI slots you won't ever use that is your own business and I respect that truly I do, but there are alternatives that maybe you could explore that would blow your mind :)
 
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