2015: Year in Review

July

SilverStone Fortress FTZ01

As was already demonstrated with the SX600-G PSU, SilverStone pushes the boundaries of small form factor systems like no other company. The Fortress FTZ01 is the premium version of the Raven RVZ01 and it comes with a far nicer aluminium shell. Space is certainly limited inside, and a full system can make the case feel pretty cramped, but with full-length GPU support you can still build a beastly mini-ITX system inside and thanks to a few little tricks it's really quite an easy case to work with in most areas. Clever use of ventilation means that its air cooling performance is still fantastic too, so worry not about hardware suffocation.

ASRock X99E-ITX/ac

X99 was never a platform we expected to see in the mini-ITX form factor, but last summer ASRock went and did it anyway. Of course, you do lose quad-channel memory support and the ability to have more than one PCI-E expansion card. You're also limited in the CPU coolers you can use with it. All of that is pretty irrelevant though – it is still without competition, and if you want to cram as many Intel cores into a tiny build as possible, it's really the only choice you have.