Foxconn 45CS Intel Atom 230 Intel 945GC Mini ITX Motherboard / CPU Combo

Pros: Bios is much better then intel boards, More Configurable Settings, Boot Menu works just as it should. Rock solid reliable, fantastic board. 100% win7 compatible, out of box, has 2(PS/2) ports, Parallel Port, Serial Port, 4 USB it has everything you need. This is ideal for most customers, They already have mouse,keyboard.printer,monitor it all drops in ANY atx old/new case bolts in and works, no fuss

Cons: the only thing that is slightly bothersome is no PATA header. but chances are if you are making a new computer you are using a new or used sata drive anyways. no real need for a optical drive anymore, everything is transferred usb/network now.

Overall Review: Runs fast for most every normal customer, is also 100% compatible with osx 10.4 10.5 10.6. nice tidbit of info i threw in there for you. I have some business customers that need the serial port, one uses it for a plotter, one uses it for a older CNC machine, the other has a vinyl sign cutting machine. Most of us would say to heck with Serial port, but customers that need it are delighted that you can make their equipment work once again. My business customers appreciate the fact you can throw this in a case and never worry about cleaning it out, no fan to dirty the inside, this thing doesn't draw enough to load down any psu, you can make a totally fan-less computer, this is great for dirty shops and high traffic areas/PointOfSale terminals

Pros: - Dirt cheap all-in-one Mini-ITX board - Graphics output has a great range of available resolutions - Pretty snappy when running Linux, not bad with XP - plenty of onboard headers for case

Cons: - No TV-out (needs a vga adapter or a PCI video card for that) - No IDE/PATA (not a big deal these days but it would be a nice touch) - Audio is advertised as 6ch but there are only 3 ports (I think they're reconfigurable, but even so you lose mic and line in). - No gigabit (okay sure, that's a long shot)

Overall Review: At this price, this board is a steal. It's not the fastest, doesn't have the most options and you won't any heavy gaming done on it, but if you need a little home file server or an emulation box or whatever, it does fine. It does everything I've needed so far, except for the fact that the onboard video doesn't support TV-out. The CMOS settings are pretty robust, but you can't overclock it as far as I know. With a passive heatsink I wouldn't really recommend it.

Pros: I have been crunching numbers, and doing a lot of thinking. This is 100% eligible for a RETAIL Leopard or Snow Leopard install. Everything is Supported OOB. I went as far as video editing with this, Yea! i ended up using iMovie 06 and i got a PCI firewire 400 card, it keeps up, You really do benefit from Hyperthreading, by about 40%, Witch is the first time i have ever said this about a intel CPU. This reminds me of the little 2 cylinder yanmar diesel that was in my bosses 80 ft sail boat, It was a Chugger but did exactly what it was designed to do.

Cons: if you have a con then you don't know what you are doing, and should of bought something pre assembled. I'm not trying to be mean! For the price of a Dinner for 2 at RedLobster, you could have this complete system. I did testing, just get one gig of ram, ( if you are using osx ) Unix doesnt care, 2 gigs didnt do much, that is with 1680x1050x32, Full screen of widgets loaded, G-Chrome, Mail, iChat, Skype, iTunes, iMovie - i am tellin ya there is no con.

Overall Review: WE are privileged to be able to purchase items Manufactured by foxconn, If it was not for newegg they would never in a million years deal with penny peddlers like us. Foxconn does business with the big guys, DELL, SONY, Nintendo, etc , thank newegg for being wonderful and allowing such great products for Wholesale prices.

Pros: Correction to previous review: Atom, not ION (no idea why I typed that.) Anyway, the board has been under constant use while driving and still has never climbed above 33C, and the core has never climbed above 30C. Also no issues with vibration either. The board sits on a 1/2" soft foam pad to mitigate vibration.

Cons: none

Pros: ION processor stays cool under load, Northbridge gets warm to the touch under load, Southbridge gets hot - but all southbridges do. This computer made the perfect solution to my car PC. I know it was an uncommon application but I ripped out my old dashboard and fabricated a complete dash with a 17" screen. This board is sealed off in a compartment and the greatest thing about no fan installed is the flexibility for cooling (if you so choose). I purchased a single 120mm IPCQUEEN fan and cut it into the dash that I made. Here is the best part - I dropped a single 512 MB stick of RAM in and it runs Windows 7 Ultimate INCLUDING Aero and all the bells and whistles while playing DVD isos from the HDD. It also plays my music and will soon be my radio and GPS with addons. This board is awesome. Since it stays in the car and is frequently used to resume playback whent he car is started, it always hibernates instead of turns off. Goes from off to desktop in 7 seconds, no lie.

Cons: It can't make my morning breakfast or coffee. The ONLY con is that it does not have HD video capability...but there are software programs to avoid that anyway. And I wasn't buying it for HD video.

Overall Review: I have a DC to DC power supply from Mini-box powering this. The M3-ATX 125 watt. It is the size of a few pushpins and works excellently. Also packed into the dash compartment is a 100W inverter to power the screen. I wrapped the 3.5mm to RCA cable fromt he computer to my amp in foil to avoid interference from the inverter and it sounds excellent. If you need a tiny PC solution with extreme flexibility....get this board.

Pros: Dual Booting OSX and WinXP sp3 This board by foxconn makes it really easy to like. When using you would have no idea that you are not using a 7 or 8 hundred dollar computer. If you are using Facebook Flash Applications, they work good. As a small reminder just don't click the HD button in youtube or HULU(its not made for hd content), But then again, Knowing you just paid 60 bucks for a brand new computer why would you expect it to run HD content?

Cons: Make sure to include ICHX Fix in the (pre install) bootloader, IF you don't you will not be able to set up hard drive in Disk utility(for install). You can also with a real mac, install snow leopard to (the hard drive for the Atom) through usb/sata adaptor then just apply boot loader after install. Updating to 10.6.2 will break atom support, but you can use osx86 tools to apply 10.6.2 patched kernel for atom cpu. Installing leopard, just make sure you have the ICHX fix into the installer bootloader. You can also install leopard retail from a real mac using (snow/hide) files and executing osinstall, installing then applying boot loader.

Overall Review: if you want to dual boot, install WinXp, make one partition 30 or 40 gigs, install, then manage and make the rest of the free space a blank unformatted partition. at this point you can ether install osx to that unformatted partition, or pull the drive and use diskutility to write a working imaged osx dmg to that partition from another mac, and apply boot loader, the bootloader is what will let you toggle between osx and winxp.