Does iTX equal small in format?

[Dirk Broer]

iTX motherboards are often used in mini-sized casings for HTPC purposes. But when you are more performance orientated Bitfenix offers you another approach.
Available in almost all colors and combinations of them (including the wrong -nVidia- green) there's the Prodigy.

What does the Prodigy have what other iTX cases do not have? Let's look at the cooling possibilities:

Cooling Front: 120mm x2 (120mm x1 included) or 140/180/200/230mm x1 (optional)
Cooling Rear: 120mm x1 (included) or 140mm x 1 (optional)
Cooling Top: 120mm x2 (optional)

And what do we want to fill the Prodigy with? The FX series does not come smaller than ATX (9xx series chipset AM3+ boards) or at best mATX (700 and 800 series AM3 boards),
so we need to look into FM2 iTX boards. Due to the good cooling possibilities we can go full out, using the A10-6800K -or the A10-6700 for those of us with more sense-

Gigabyte has just launched a nice, black, A85X iTX board with WiFi and bluetooth (and an even newer A88X iTX variant of it as well by now):


You can install a Corsair H110 watercooling in the Prodigy for the APU and by using the Corsair AF140 for all positions (water cooling, top front and rear) with red ring you can, when you opt
for a black-red Prodigy casing and a black-red video card (say a PowerColor HD 7870 PCS+ Vortex II ), get a very attractive case. Using two 8 GB red memory sticks from e.g. G.Skill or Corsair
will further enhance the looks.



This one is almost good, but uses the wrong video card (but shows a HD 7870 fits in)

Note the board goes in horizontally in the Prodigy!

No, it's not a HTPC and nor will it be silent. It will game and crunch well though.

[NeoGen]

That is a big box for such a small motherboard.

I have a Mini-iTX motherboard system (my current Freenas box) and it's so tiny that I was almost afraid to set the components in.
My mistake was to get an equally small and slim case to it that has space for the motherboard and little more... I didn't think about ventilation or thermal dissipation. The result is that I had to underclock the Athlon X3 processor inside it and find a low profile CPU cooler that could fit in it just to make sure the thing wouldn't melt inside the box under heavy load.

[Dirk Broer]

You might want to think about this 140mm low profile cooler

[Terry1953]

That is a big box for such a small motherboard.

I have a Mini-iTX motherboard system (my current Freenas box) and it's so tiny that I was almost afraid to set the components in.
My mistake was to get an equally small and slim case to it that has space for the motherboard and little more... I didn't think about ventilation or thermal dissipation. The result is that I had to underclock the Athlon X3 processor inside it and find a low profile CPU cooler that could fit in it just to make sure the thing wouldn't melt inside the box under heavy load.

If your not worried about looks you could go with a Corsair H80i and just let the radiator sit outside the box.

[NeoGen]

You might want to think about this 140mm low profile cooler

The official specs of Mini-ITX are 170x170, that 140mm would almost cover the whole motherboard.
I got a similar one but smaller...not sure of the size right now but probably around 100mm give or take.

[Dirk Broer]

The BitFenix Prodigy is -for an iTX casing- rather spacious. So spacious that one fan managed to fill it with a μATX board (that was before BitFenix brought out their Prodigy M), whilst retaining the horizontal position of the motherboard (something BitFenix themselves could not pull off).
These adventures are brought to naught by the chap who managed to wrestle an EATX board into the casing though .
Wonder where he keeps his disks...Solved: together with the PSU at the other side of the motherboard!

So there stops the bucket, I thought. Not so! You can even fit three iTX mobos into one Prodigy!:
This Gyro Gearloose even thinks of fitting in four mobo's....