Introduction

Mini-ITX is sure getting its day in the sun. Ever since VIA brought this new standard for micro motherboards to the party, everyone has gotten in on it. Intel was extremely reluctant to bring Atom into the Mini-ITX market; in fact, they wanted a totally new standard board that would be 17.5x18cm, just to be different. However, through pressure from their partners Intel finally put Atom out as a Mini-ITX compliant offering, so now we have an industry standard that really packs a lot into a tiny board.

Albatron are no strangers to Mini-ITX, in fact we have already tested a couple of boards from them on a Mini-ITX format, including a Socket 754 based and an AM2 based board. Today, however, they are raising the stakes just a little higher. Phenom may not be the highest clocking kid on the block and it can't keep up with Intel on a clock-for-clock basis with Core 2, let alone Core i7, but where AMD lacks in the enthusiast market, they do have the goods in the power friendly market. Not only that, a top clocking Phenom X4 processor can also be had for cheap now.

Today Albatron have sent us their Mini-ITX KI780G board based around AMD's very popular IGP chipset, the 780G. Let's see just how well it's able to perform compared to VIA's Nano platform.