While this review is interesting, it seems the author totally ignored the main player in this market - VIA.

Their solutions are very competitive, and very likely the best, in the performance range right above the Atom, and should have been compared with this group, especially their newer products.

Ilya,

Thank you for the article about another SSF motherboard. It's all I'm interested in these days. I don't even read about the fat ass ones any more. But I've wondered why no AMD ones have appeared after they spent considerable marketing capital pushing mini-DTX a couple of years ago. Maybe your explanation AMD’s belief that their CPUs are no good for compact multimedia PCs has led to the fact that there are nearly no modern Socket AM3 mainboards in the mini-ITX form-factor in the today’s market is the answer. It is true that AMD is, and has been, at least one year behind Intel in lithography which has severely limited their competitiveness and as long as they stay behind in litho their market penetration and stock price, among other things, will languish. It really doesn't matter if they have a great architecture, which they don't, or not if they are 2x behind in litho because today you have to have them both to be a winner.

Anyway, that's not why I'm posting. I'm posting about Sapphire Technology. Here in the USA, Sapphire does not even list a phone number for their company on their website and apparently Tech Support is by email. As far as I am concerned nada, no way, no teeny deniro.

Orville

Good Article, I am just curious about one thing. If the 250u uses the Regor core, how come virtualization is listed as NO? It should come with AMD-V support like other Regor based chips.

There is one other AM3 m-itx board that is quite readily available here in AU made by J&W Tech (J&W MINIX-785G) that is near identical to the Sapphire IPC-AM3DD785G apart from using DDR2 Sodimm

I use one in one of my HTPC's and it performs very well and is much cheaper to build compared to any Intel/NV m-itx build