An almost-perfect Mini ITX board. Intel's consumer CPU focus in the first half of 2017 has been on maximising the efficiency of its laptop chips. We can argue for this point because, lately, most of the firm's innovation has been centred on the U-series. Now offering four cores and eight threads hewn from the Kaby Lake architecture, these 15W silicon supremos put desktop efficiency to shame.

The enthusiast and DIY market has had something to shout about at last, though. You see, the chip giant debuted 8th Generation Core Coffee Lake-based chips just last month, packing up to six cores and 12 threads at similar thermal and wattage levels as the previous generation. But getting your hands on such a platform also requires investing in a Z370 chipset motherboard, meaning it's a clean break, as the 7th Generation Core processors won't work in the new platform.

But that's OK for a number of folks upgrading from, say, a PC that's three to five years old. To them compatibility between generations is an academic concern, so the only question that needs answering is which chip and board to get? You can go normal ATX, you can go a bit smaller and look at Micro ATX, but fully appreciating the overall platform-level efficiencies baked into new architectures, why not run with Mini ITX?