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Devon K.

Devon K.

Joined on 04/23/07

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Product Reviews
product reviews
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Most Critical Review

Risky buy

ZOTAC GF9300-I-E LGA 775 NVIDIA GeForce 9300 HDMI Mini ITX Intel Motherboard
ZOTAC GF9300-I-E LGA 775 NVIDIA GeForce 9300 HDMI Mini ITX Intel Motherboard

Pros: "Good" performance, good features, heatsink reasonable for chipset / GPU, reasonable board layout given form factor

Cons: I cannot recommend boards made by this manufacturer whatsoever. Poor QA process leads to boards being approved that can't do a very possible 2x2GB of RAM in dual channel. The approved RAM list and configuration test matrix on their site show almost no dual channel configurations (the [i]one[/i] they have is for 512MB DIMMs, hardly relevant), so I have zero guarantee that any number of RMAs would solve my problem. This sort of oversight leads me to wonder how bad QA is in other areas, leading to my conclusion.

Overall Review: There's no other practical options for a mini-ITX LGA 775 board that has an onboard GPU powerful enough to work in a HTPC use configuration. If you must keep an LGA 775 config for your own HTPC, I'd recommend going with another manufacturer's boards and tacking on a GT 220 video card. That would set you back $130 or so if you get very lucky. By the time the costs add up, you might as well just go buy a new system that uses DDR3 RAM.