AM2 - uATX or mini-ITX?

[S. Starbuck]

In the next few months I will be replacing the motherboard in my main pc due to some problems I'm having with it. I'm also most likely going to upgrade to either a tri or quad core at this point. (Currently I'm using an Athlon X2 5000BE)

Now this would leave me with both that Athlon and also a Sempron 3000 I've got doing nothing.

I'd like to get them setup as dedicated crunchers, but I'll need a motherboard for each.
Power wise I'll be using a picoPSU: http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/info_1798.html
And a Compact Flash (connected with an IDE adaptor) to store the OS, which will be a stripped down linux install running headless.

Now I want try and use as small a footprint as possible - both in size and power use, to try and keep the bills down.

mini-ITX boards would appear to be ideal in this case, but from what I can find they are all in the £100+ range. That's a lot, when I can get a uATX AM2 board for under £30.

So I'm wondering, does anyone have experience with AM2 mini-ITX boards? And if so, are they worth getting over their larger cousins?

[S. Starbuck]

OK, I've done some more looking around, and it does appear that the advantages of a mini-ITX board just don't justify the high price tag.

I've found a lot of Asus MS2-MX boards going cheep on ebay, so I'm leaning more towards simply going the uATX road.

I am still open to suggestions however.

[Bender10]

I have built around 6 crunchers on uATX (M2N-MX) boards, and had great luck with them. I also use the smallest case I can find for a good (cheep) price. A 400 watt ps will power the mb, hd, oem cpu fan and a slightly oc'd (~2.8 ghz or so) AMD X2 5200 quite well. I hook up a temporary CD drive for the install, and remove it when setup is complete.

As crunchers, the on-board video and lan cut down on extra parts ($$). The boards I have used (asus) are not too good for overclocking, but I don't do much of that anyway.

These work great on W2K and XP. Linux does not like these (M2N-MX) boards, but I only tried a couple of flavors...

[S. Starbuck]

Thanks for the input Bender10, I've decided I am just going to go with uATX boards.

Thanks for the heads up about the problems you had with installing linux on your ones, I've had a look around to see if anyone has reported any problems with the boards MS2 boards, and havn't found any as yet, so hopfully I can get linux working on there without too much problems.

I ordered a powermeter the other day, so that when the boards arrive I can power them up with my current PSU to get an idea of what PSU I'll need to get for each of them.

I'll keep you all updated with progress!