Intro:
When people think about ITX, there are a few stigmas that come to mind. The first is that there is limited choice. The second is that performance is lacking. While these two points may have been true in the past, no longer is ITX relegated to the specific niche crowd. Intel has been releasing ITX boards for a long time and their latest releases have come a long way. The DG45FC is an ITX board that accepts 45nm CPUs. Pairing this board with a Core 2 will give you performance of a full sized desktop in a tiny package.
Parts:
Hilariously, the board includes a floppy disk with the RAID driver on it (for Windows, I assume). The board doesn't have a floppy connector so unless you use a USB floppy drive (which does work), you are SOL. Regardless, there are no drivers required for use with Linux. There are two SATA cables included since that's the only type of drive connection. A Windows software CD and the I/O shield is included as well. Intel always includes a very handy sticker to show the various connections and headers on the board. fakeRAID is supported by dmraid on Linux.
DG45FC:
The DG45FC is a nice and small board since it is ITX. As a refresher, ITX is about the same size as a normal CD case and is aimed at small and (hopefully) quiet PCs for use in embedded or entertainment systems. There is a single 1x PCI Express slot for adding functionality to the board. You probably won't be running any sort of high end graphics on this board, but there are good 1x graphics cards you can get if you don't want to stick with the integrated video. There is no active cooling on the board. You will probably be pairing this with an actively cooled CPU, though. Basically, the board is silent for itself.
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