ASUS Q87T Thin-ITX Has Custom Solutions Header (aka HTPC_HEADER)
I’ve been in a bit of a motherboard funk ever since Intel announced that they were leaving the business. While other OEMs make solid kit, none have embraced the the HTPC niche in the same way that Intel has. It looks like that may be changing though, because it looks like ASUS may have picked up the mantle with their new Q87T Haswell Thin-ITX which includes a Custom Solutions Header (HTPC_HEADER) that will work with Pulse-Eight’s internal CEC adapter. Internal CIR is sadly missing, but at least that’s easy to fix. Well done ASUS.
This motherboard is kind of
This motherboard is kind of cost prohibitive. The other problem is that a lot of people want to build a HTPC that they can use for gaming. This type of motherboard for gaming does not work that well because Thin Mini ITX does not have a high power handling capability and cant support a gaming video card due to the power requirements. Then there are the overclockers that want a large CPU Cooler.
Then some of the other people want a lot of hard drives and RAID for a server installation.
I think Thin Mini ITX might be just fine for HTPC. However, I might be in the minority on this subject. Another thing to look at is the price of a power supply or AC/DC adapter. Some people are trying to underpower this type of setup and it caused problems. Seems like all the cases for these are the ultra thin kind but I still want an optical drive and a full size hard drive.
A lot of these are just too expensive with all of these variables.