The Mini-ITX standard has quietly flourished beyond the sight of the most consumers, but it is beginning to make the transition from industrial and commercial applications, into the form of a truly compact alternative for the rest of us. After all, why stick an MP3 player into your car when you could put in an entire mini-ITX computer system, with graphics, and support for four SATA hard drives worth of music?!

The biggest complaint about Mini-ITX systems to date has been relatively low computing power. VIA has lead the Mini-ITX movement with its C3 & C7 processors, which are extremely power efficient, but a bit underpowered. Industrial single board computer systems have been stuck in the Pentium III and Pentium 4 crossroads for some time, so from this perspective Albatron have introduced an excellent 64-bit compatible platform with a good integrated video chipset. The nVidia Geforce 6150 is arguably more popular than Intel P965 Express.... and that's what really gives the Albatron KI51PV-754 motherboard an edge in the mini-ITX segment.

Based around the multipurpose nVIDIA GeForce 6150 Northbridge and nForce 430 MCP Southbridge, the Albatron KI51PV-754 motherboard is compatible with Socket 754 AMD Athlon64 and Sempron processors. It makes sense for Albatron to go the Socket 754 route, due to the limited space only a single stick of memory is used here.

Measuring no larger than 170 x 170mm in size, the Albatron KI51PV-754 packs in a lot of features. The most notable are dual network cards (one Gigabit, one 10/100), an onboard videocard which supports dual monitors (analog and digital), a 5.1 channel audio controller and four Serial ATA II (with RAID) and two IDE channels. There is a 32 bit PCI slot for expansion, which is going to come in handy if the KI51PV-754 is used for commercial applications in particular.

The layout of the Albatron KI51PV-754 is good, and installing the system and getting it up and running was none too difficult. Our only regret was not being able to compare the Albatron KI51PV-754 mini-ITX motherboard against a VIA Micro-ITX based system...

The socket 754 AMD Athlon64 3200+ processor remained fairly well placed against a crop of current-model dual core processors in the office and system-oriented benchmark tests. The KI51PV-754 was the slowest platform, but didn't lag the other dual-core rigs by grossly large margins for the most part. More importantly, all the office applications generally ran at acceptable performance levels. The HD content playback tests illustrated a shortcoming with the Geforce 6150 and this single core DDR based platform, but as long as the system was left dedicated to the task it squeezed by. Gaming and 3D benchmarks were deliberately left out. The onboard GeForce 6150 is not a fast gaming videocard, and gaming really isn't the focus of the KI51PV-754 either.

The Albatron KI51PV-754 mini-ITX motherboard is a very particular platform for very specific applications; consumer, commercial, industrial, or scientific. This is not a mini-ITX motherboard for everyone, nor is it a replacement for the mass-produced small formfactor toaster PCs. If you need the power of a 64-bit compatible Athlon64 PC in a package that's smaller than most 1st year Calculus textbooks, look no further. Micro-ITX just got a big shot in the arm in terms of performance thanks to Albatron and its KI51PV-754 motherboard.

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