With a price around 250 euros, MB870 matches up quite nicely against VIA's EPIA MII12000 that sells around 230 euros. Naturally VIA's offer includes the C3 CPU but when you concider the power difference that you can gain with a fast P4 CPU and 9100IGP graphics, I believe that you will find MB870 really interesting.

It is quite amazing how much functionality and possibilities this motherboard offers. Small size makes it possible to use it in tons of different modding projects. You may have noticed all of these toaster and breadbox PCs and they are usually build around VIA EPIA Mini-ITX motherboards. MB870 offers so much more in terms of computation and graphics power that it will be interesting to see where these units will eventually end up being integrated.

I have to say that I really liked this motherboard. It may not be the fastest Pentium 4 motherboard around or have the latest PCIE technologies included but it offers something new to the Mini-ITX community. New ideas and innovations keep the ball rolling and for now, in Mini-ITX world, MB870 is leading the way.

It was quite hard to decide if there is a need to find CONS for the product. It all depends on what you are expecting from the board. Overclockers might feel that the board was limited because it didn't have voltage or FSB frequency settings. Video editors would have found Firewire connectors usefull and server operators could have used a Gigabit LAN connector or an extra 100Mbit one. I believe that this time it is better to let the readers to decide whether the product has the functions and properties that they need. I just hope that this review got you interested about this form factor and its possibilities.

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