@ADTG Not for much longer you don't. Intel is going to stop producing consumer desktop boards by 2016.
@BoredSysAdmin I don't personally see the tiny box as a selling point because I don't know anyone who is so size constrained that they can't fit a shoebox sized system in with their equipment. Once you factor in that the power supply on the Asus is external and that it doesn't have any space for in internal disc drive, the size difference is negligible at best. I do agree with you that the PSU that comes with the Apex case is pretty un-stellar, but I would be incredibly surprised if it were any worse than what comes with the Asus. The case itself however, I will gladly stand-up for. I have plenty of experience with premium cases from Lian-Li, Silverstone (currently have an FT-02 for my gaming rig), Cooler Master, Corsair etc. and I was really surprised with how well engineered it is for such a small and inexpensive case. Everything fits extremely well, it doesn't use any non-standard sizes for things like the PSU, so you can go get a Seasonic ITX power supply if you want, and whether by accident or on purpose, it has exactly enough space to fit a 120mm exhaust fan that is held in place by the chassis rails. Very, very little wasted space inside the box with just enough room for expansion.
As for whether or not the extra power is necessary, I suppose that depends on perspective. For me, I currently have about 600 blu-ray movies (and almost always adding more) that I've re-encoded so my roommates can watch them on their devices on the go. All that encoding can take some decent power if I don't feel like waiting a day for every movie to finish. Usually I just que up a batch of 10 or so movies on my HTPC and the i5 gets them all done at extremely high quality within about a 24-hour period. Doing the same thing on an Atom would probably take multiple days per movie, so it's simply not an option for me.
Also, 4k is rapidly approaching and I have no doubt that the i5 will be up to the task when it does. If the on-board video ends up being insufficient, I can spring for a $30-50 video card and the problem is solved. Not so with the Asus.
To address your point of reliability, I'm not quite clear where this is coming from. Everything I linked is from a reputable company with industry standard 2-3 year warranties on pretty much every component.
@Grador I agree completely. I'd say only in the last 2 or so years with the advent of Sandy Bridge and to a lesser extent AMDs Llano CPUs with quality integrated graphics capabilities has this really been a viable solution. The price to performance on these chips is absolutely stellar and they only keep getting better. I was lucky enough to test on the pre-production version of Sandy Bridge about a year before it was released and it absolutely felt like a game changer. Plus I am lazy and having to add in even less components to get a computer bootable is perfectly ok with me
@hizzah I don't know much about Raspberry Pi other than it being a full SoC solution designed to run Linux. Are they really powerful enough to push blu-ray content? At some point I may build an ITX or similar form factor PC using an old NES shell that I have, so it might be a viable solution for that if it's really capable enough.
@TLS Guy The case itself doesn't have any active cooling, but using the stock Intel HSF and one of
these (a great balance of decent performance, low noise, low cost and removable blades for easy cleaning) I'd say the loudest thing in the case most of the time is the blu-ray or HDD. If the stock cooler is too loud for you, you could go with a Silverstone NT07 and set it to low. Personally I think they are all inaudible unless you are sitting head first inside your PC, but I'm not the best judge since I do have some minor hearing loss.
