BIOSTAR NM70I-847 Intel Celeron 847 1.1GHz 2C/2T BGA1023 Intel NM70 Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo

Pros: Quiet, fast, 1080p video, easy setup, no messing with processor thermal paste, very small, decent documentation. It came with a free 8 gig stick of RAM which made this an amazing deal.

Cons: Some popular flavors of Linux have a weird shutdown issue? Its the only thing that kept me from giving this a perfect score. I wish more Mobo makers take Linux into account.

Other Thoughts: Zeven OS 5 (an Ubuntu based distro, and one of my favorites because its similar to BeOS and Mac OS9 classic) abruptly powers the PC off for no reason after about 20 minutes. I red online that other people running Ubuntu based distros were having the same issue on this board. Fedora 18 seemed to power off after a few minutes using the live version? Luckily, PCLinuxOS (64 bit) works flawless and is a very nice distribution because everything works out of the box (It came with everything I wanted accept Google Chrome. Adding Chrome was simple in Synaptic Package Manager but I had to enable extra repositories). Someone else has a review saying CentOS works perfect as well. I went with PCLinuxOS because it had more stuff built in out of the box.

Everything is online these days and so there is no reason to run Windows. Those that do are "old school" and still think you need office to type letter and have not idea what Google docs is. The same people think you need AOL to be online, don't know what browser they are using and think they need the yahoo and bing toolbar attached to IE8. These are the same people who use email from their ISP rather than going online and signing up for email.

Pros: Speedy compared to an ATOM 330, runs cool, low heat generated

Cons: Bought the motheboard + memory combo from NEWEGG in late NOV. 2012. Board suffered from random reboots after running from several seconds to as long as 4 hours. Swapped memory, power supply and drives. Same problem. Memory is now happily running in another system without a problem. Got RMA from BIOSTAR & shipped board in mid March. Now waiting for BIOSTAR response.

Pros: For the price, this does everything I have wanted it to do for a music/htpc server. Loaded with 4gb of ram, Windows loads considerably fast for the 1.1mhz rating. IE, Winamp, XMBC, etc all perform as well as the Celeron 530 I have in my other budget HTPC build

Cons: For the money - there are none!...

Pros: came with ram.

Cons: never worked out of the box. kind of difficult to unhook power supply cable and some sata cables.

Pros: -HDMI out works right from the get-go, even in the BIOS screens!
-Small, takes up little space in a mini-atx case
-With 4G of 1333 RAM and Win 7 32 bit it ran Netflix HD and HD MKVs just fine. With 8G 1333 RAM and Win 7 64 bit it's running those even better without stuttering at all.
-Included PCI-e slot is nice.
-Plenty of SATA ports, especially for an HTPC build.
-CPU runs around 44 all the time even with the case fan being a low flow one
-Ran XBMCBuntu just to mess with it and it worked great as well.

Cons: -the backplate had the audio holes covered and the HDMI as well. Not a big deal to fix, just annoying.

-Had to uninstall the Realtek HD audio drivers to get the sound working in Win 7. That's really weird but once they were uninstalled everything worked fine.

Other Thoughts: Had it running for a month now as part of my HTPC and so far this is a great little board! Not sure how long it'll hold out but if it lasts a good while then I'll have been quite happy with it.

Pros: Sandy bridge way better than Atom. Similar to the server review. Running at 28w idle and 35w max. Using a 60 watt power supply.

Cons: Doesn't play well with Ubuntu based distros and I am not sure why. Would randomly crash about every 20 minutes. Currently running Centos with no problems, rock solid.

Other Thoughts: Makes a very nice low power home server.

Pros: Used this with a GT 640 to build a media center PC and I don't have any complaints really. It works and runs quiet. The CPU is not all that fast but I knew that before I bought it. It's a very power efficient solution for building a home theatre PC.

Cons: Celerons have limited features. There is no hyperthreading, and I don't think you can put a better CPU on this motherboard.

Pros: Mobile Sandy Bridge architecture chip on a board for under $100.

low power consumption. chip TDP is rated at 17W. With just 2 sticks of memory and an SSD, I'm seeing power usage of about 22 watts (measured with a kill-a-watt) at idle (I used an inefficient PSU)

PCIE x16 slot if you need to add in a board.

Quiet, cool.

Cons: No options on CPU (celeron 847 only). Biostar does not appear to offer any other CPUs as options.

lack of mini pcie slot, but considering the price range and availability of a pcie x16 slot, it's just a minor wish list item.

Other Thoughts: Something like this has been sorely missing for a while.
AMD has their E-series of chips and boards in this market segment, but Intel only had their crippled Atom D2xxx (lack of 64-bit graphics drivers?) Both offerings were a bit underpowered for anything more than a nas box. The Sandy bridge celerons are significantly more powerful than either Atom or E-series and allow much more flexibility.

I'm currently using this for a mini file/media/backup server in a 4-bay NAS chassis (CFI A7879) with 4 GB of ram a small SSD for os and 3 1 TB HD for storage. I am very pleased with the performance, noise level and power.

Would love to see this mobo with more CPU options up to the celeron 887 at 1.5 ghz.

Pros: - Very low power usage
- Smooth 1080p HD playback
- Plays Netflix HD (high CPU usage but it plays!)
- HDMI
- 4 x SATA
- CPU fan is replaceable
- Intel 2000 HD GPU (as reported by HWInfo)

Cons: - Noisy CPU fan
- Some applications slow to install or load
- Windows install takes a long time (unzip speeds seem slow)

Other Thoughts: I bought this recently to test as a HTPC board for use in the Iwill S197-H80 mini-itx HTPC case. This is a very tight 197mmx197mmx80mm case with little room or ventilation that needs a low power board. The problem is neither the Atom nor Zacate support Netflix HD streaming. I had high hope for this board with a Celeron mobile CPU and Intel 2000 HD GPU (the same as in the i3-2100 but underclocked). So far it's been brilliant in testing. 1080p MKVs play smoothly with hardly any CPU usage. Netflix HD video will play though with high CPU usage which ramps up the fan but at least they play! The board has HDMI which is required for HTPC. Generally it runs cool, around 50C when watching videos and maxed out around 70C with Prime95 large FFTs. Power draw numbers were very good as measured with a Kill-a-Watt (using a picoPSU 90, 60W AC adapter under Win7 Ultimate x64):

Desktop: 15W
1080p MKV (using WMP): 17.7W
Prime95 large FFTs torture test: 26.2W

The downside is first the noisy CPU fan. It's a small 40x10 high-speed fan that can get loud when doing CPU intensive tasks. Most tasks are CPU intensive except watching video so it's ramping up and down a lot. Unzipping archives for install and Windows extraction for install seemed very slow. Some apps take a little while longer than with a desktop CPU to load.

Overall, for the price, the form-factor, the power usage and everything else this is a fantastic HTPC board. I am definitely going to use these in HTPC barebones builds in the aforementioned case and I am ecstatic about it. This is a leap-of-faith having always avoided Biostar due to reputation so hopefully these hold up. If they do I hope to be buying a lot of them for these very small form factor HTPC builds.