Wireless & conclusion
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Setting up with wireless was easy enough. You simply plug the add-in card to the motherboard, install drivers and you’re good to go. Performance was on par with any other 54MB card we’ve seen so far. 3-5MB/s transfer rates were easy to achieve using Linksys WRT54GL wlan box. We had two concrete walls between the computer and wlan router, yet we did not see any problems with connection. Also you can add a better external antenna to the antenna connector.
Conclusion:
Mini-ITX motherboards are in no way meant to be used in high end computers. Therefore we decided to test Zotac 9300-ITX WIFI mainly from HTPC use point of view. In our tests it managed to perform reasonably well. At some tests it won the intel chipsetted micro-atx MSI motherboard, on the other hand in some tests it lost. Having a PCI-E 16x slot however and 2x memory slots and fairly powerful graphics chip, it makes a great candidate for your HTPC. Zotac has managed to put everything you would think to need in one small packet. There was one thing missing though, the legacy IDE-connector. Some of us still have DVD-drives and hard disks which are IDE connected and would love to use them in HTPC. Even with that minor flaw, I could recommend this motherboard to anyone who is building a mini-itx sized HTPC setup.
Pros:
+ Mini-ITX sized
+ PCI-E 16x
+ 2x DIMM slots
+ Good amount of connectors in I/O panel
Cons:
- No IDE connector
- High CPU-stress in h.264 tests
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