Valve have seemingly been owning our headlines for the past two weeks, with all the announcements and rumors about their push into PC gaming in the living room. If that doesn’t get you interested in Steam Machines themselves, maybe you are at least thinking of building a living room gaming PC. If that’s the case, you’ll probably be looking at small form factor systems based on mATX or mITX.. mITX platforms do exist that can accommodate high end hardware, but you give up a lot to get there. Right now, mATX is the easier way to build a small sized high end gaming PC.

It used to be that mATX automatically meant “budget” and therefore motherboards would have lower end features and cheaper components. That’s no longer the case, as the Gigabyte Z87M-D3H we’re looking at here is based on their ATX sized Z87X-D3H. Perhaps we’ll look at that board separately some time.