Originally Posted By: Gordon Scott
Originally Posted By: Simon - PG Music
Certainly, but you can cram a lot of performance into an ITX machine these days.

Aye ... BTW I forgot to mention that both of those ITX machines of mine are around a decade old now.

Series 11 i5s seem to be a fairly common ITX engine now. There are even some 12th gens. ITX boards tend to use the laptop CPUs for efficiency, which certainly helps wrt fan noise. There are some ITX cases around that have aluminium fins and heat-pipes to allow fanless operation for around the 65W TDP CPUs. That includes a number of 12th gen parts and AMD parts, though most(?) 12th gens appear to need throttling back to stay within the 65W.

ITX can give pretty impressive performance for modest cost, size and energy.

That's something I encountered when I built my current production machine, which has an i9-9900K - the motherboard would basically allow it to exceed it's TDP by more than double, but for a relatively small performance increase. I ended up enabling TDP enforcement (can't remember what the actual option was called) which keeps temperature and fan noise down but still gives much more performance than is required for audio.

I do the same in my ITX gaming machine, and the performance is about as good as my i9. For the most part, computers these days have more performance than most people need.

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