Can anyone recommend a power efficient, small, mobile motherboard for an AMD Mobile Athlon 64 3400+ (2.2 ghz) processor? It'll be running some form of Linux.

 

Thanks in advance.

Motherboards are judged mainly by their featured chipset. A hot chipset at the moment is the nVidia nForce 4. It features an ultra compact "chip" rather than chipset, meaning there is no North and South bridge as you will usually find in most any other motherboard. It also incorporates within its chip nearly about everything you will need in a computer including ethernet, SLI, PCI express, Serial ATA, RAID if you need it. I've never seen a comparison between motherboards in terms of memory consumption. A majority of power dissipation occurs at the CPU itself rather.

 

Choosing brands is a matter of choosing features. You can choose between Abit, Asus, MSI, Soltek, EpoX, etc. They will all have different features and different sizes. Get what you need to make it most compact. Another solid chipset is the VIA K8T890.

DFI NF4 Sli is a mobo that i would recommend. I should be receiving one today actually, i'm building new system. They don't come cheap, but they're the best IMO.

Good place for reference reviews of mobos:

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/index.html

wouldn't happen to know if there are motherboards that are about 15 centimeters square (15 x 15) or a bit larger, would you?