Intel announces Mini ITX board

Mini ITX boards are great, especially for those that love to mod and build custom machines. Intel has taken an interest in the standard and will be releasing their own Mini ITX board named Little Valley D201GLY.

What is interesting is that Intel has chosen to go with a SiS chipset, rather than one of their own. It is possible that with this being such a new venture for them, that they wanted to start out by going with a chipset that has already proven its worth. The board has an integrated Yonah-based Celeron 215 processor that clocks in at 1.33GHz with a 533MHz FSB and 512KB of L2 cache.

The little board should be enough to power most small media center PCs, but I wouldn't expect it to pack much of a punch with the Celeron 215 at the helm. But these boards aren't designed with power in mind. One thing that disappoints me is that the CPU cooler is not passive. I would imagine that the first thing that most enthusiasts do is change out the heatsink. People don't want these things to be quiet, they want them silent.

Intel Takes on Mini ITX [via dailytech]