ZOTAC GF8200-C-E AM2+/AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 8200 Mini ITX AMD Motherboard

Pros: Nice board for HTPC. Small and powerful.

Cons: No IDE, included dongle needed for HDMI connector

Overall Review: Watch out for their rebate policy designed to reject your rebate. You have to wait at least 30 days but not longer than 45 days to postmark your rebate. This is not very clear from the rebate form. I learned about it by contacting the company. When I suggested it was a ploy to screw their customers I received the following from Daniel Park, RMA Specialist: Our company motto is that “Our customers are always right.”. Please understand that our policy is our policy and that it will stand as long as our president says so. He created the motto and he created the policy. If you can not respect our motto as well as our policy. Do as you please. Just know you are making a big mistake. Have a wonderful day. I worry this odd version of "the customer is always right' might apply to warranty returns as well. Lets hope not.

Pros: Great little board, does everything as advertised. I paired it with a Athlon II X2 240. Installed 32 bit Ubuntu Linux, and everything works out of the box except wi-fi. If you google "launchpad bug #162671", post #50 explains how to make it work. Once I found that, wi-fi was up and running within minutes. I have not had any USB issues; I'm using a USB mouse, keyboard, remote, and sometimes flashdrive. No problems at all.

Cons: The vt6656 driver is not included in the default Ubuntu kernel, it needs to be manually installed. I have read that the driver does not support WPA, but I have not verified this, I am using WEP.

Overall Review: The GPU runs at about 60 degrees Celsius when it's not doing anything, and gets up to 75 degrees when I'm watching TV. That's probably more a function of having no case fan than the motherboard, but it's worth a mention.

Pros: Nice board, good layout, looks good, Takes normal DDR 800, Has Wifi, good price compaired to other ITX's. Nvidia's HDMI worked without having to adjust overscan or any other setting that needed to be done on 780G chipset. Installing Win 7 went smooth.

Cons: Chipset says its running at 50c Idle and 70C durring online FPS. (with added fan on heatsink and a open case) Room temp 18-19C. Only 2 internal USB Headers. (half of one used up by WiFi)USB seems to be able to freeze it up durring boot. (froze up on me with first card reader pluged in) seems others had simular problems with USB devices. No automatic CPU fan Control. Doesn't seem like Zotac has very good Customer support. (But Jetway and J&W might be worse.) 780G chipset runs better.

Overall Review: AMD 5200+, Winsis WI-02C Case, OCZ DDR 800 2x1g, Stock heatsink. 780G chipset with same parts scored .1 better in Win 7. 3D Mark 06 score was 930, 780g was 1130, 780g +sideport 1330. 780g game play seemed smoother The Heat, USB, and Zotac customer support worries might keep me from building this for costomers. But Seems like it could be a really nice board other wise. Zotac looks like they are heading in the right direction with ITX hope they don't drop the ball. sorry for spelling errors using this board and haven't installed the spell checker yet ;)

Pros: AMD Phenom II X4 940 running at 3.0GHz - with 8MB Cache - and a 125 watt TDP, loaded and installed windows 7 ultimate 64 bit - no need to use the driver disk and load "old" drivers when Windows just "Plug & Play" all drivers, etc and installed via windows update & hardeare manager...

Cons: None

Overall Review: Will try to do a more in depth review, but so far so good, simple OC options, stable and rock solid build so far. ITX case and layout is perfect match

Pros: absolutely no problems whatsoever. it was awesome. 1) bought parts 2) put them together 3) worked perfectly first time

Cons: BIOS could be better, could be a lot worse. Have not been able to get RAM to 1066 yet.

Overall Review: smokin' little shoebox for not much money :) * Case/PS: APEX MI-008 Mini-ITX * DVD: SONY AD-7240S-0B Optiarc 24X * CPU cooler: SILVERSTONE NT07-AM2 80mm * RAM: G.SKILL F2-8500CL5D-4GBPK 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 * CPU: AMD HD8250ODJ3BGH Phenom X3 8250e * Slot cooler (don't laugh): EVERCOOL SB-F1 (GELID FN-PX12-15 120mm PWM Case Fan on the way) * HD: WD Caviar Green WD5000AADS 500GB

Pros: Mini-ITX, nvidia 8200 series chipset, runs well with 7750 Kuma, dual-channel memory, wifi kits works extremely well. If you don't have any real desire to game then this if perfectly adequate to run any newer flavor of Windows or Linux, business apps and most any video at higher resolutions. For me, the best part is the small form factor. I'm soooo tired of big ugly boxes and loud fans.

Cons: True variable, heat-sensitive control for PWM CPU fans. There are preset speeds and so far the "medium" setting seems to work fine without allowing the CPU to overheat. On-board sound is Realtek HD, but there is bleed-through distortion of the computer peripherals at times, especially under high hard drive usage. I've owned other brands of M/B's with Nvidia chipsets and Realtek HD audio and didn't have this problem, so I know it can be done.

Overall Review: Passive heatsink on the chipset works well, but it still needs a little airflow to keep the chipset from running quite hot. I started out with an LE-1620 CPU and due to the design of the CPU heatsink none of the airflow from the CPU got to the chipset heatsink. I switched to the 7750 Kuma which has a multi-directional fin design (similar to brand I) that allows air from the CPU fan to cool the chipset heatsink. With a well ventilated enclosure I now only need 1 fan, keeping the noise to a bare minimum.

Pros: Compact size: The mini-ITX size is absolutely perfect for HTPC and CarPC's Lots of features: Lots of usb ports, wifi add-on works great, onboard nvidia GPU power. Customer support is more responsive than I expected. Support tickets usually get returned within a business day. ( I was expecting much longer, but was pleasantly suprised) Great support for a wide range of AM2+ processors. Over the last few weeks I have seen zotac increase their list of supported and tested CPUs and memory chips. Which included a couple of 125W CPUs. This really helped me out as I was working on a project to put a high wattage CPU in a carPC (here in the south it gets hot!) Great price amongst other mini-itx motherboards out there. Looking forward to this market growing so the price will start to come down some more.

Cons: S3 Sleep mode doesn't work correctly in Vista/Windows7. After putting board to sleep and pressing the power button to wake it back up, the board turns on, and the fans start spinning but after about 1 second, turns off again. After a second press of the power button it boots up claiming it was not shut down properly. I've contacted zotac about this, and they say it's a bug with Vista and this nforce chipset. I've tried a couple of different versions of the chipset driver without any success.

Overall Review: It seems that many people are starting to use these zotac boards for carPCs. A couple of people I talked to are using the GF8300 model with support for the intel cpus and are praising them. Excelent work Zotac!

Pros: Great Layout PCI-E x1 Slot Great Onboard Video Solid Capacitors

Cons: None that I can think of. . .

Overall Review: This board was used as a "fun" build with a leftover x2 3800+ 65w and 2GB DDR2 800. All the machines in the house are 64 bit and running 98 Virtual Machines with newer hardware had its drawbacks. This is basically just running XP and playing older games. It works great and may even end up as the HTPC.