Mcubed manufactures an external 150W brick-type PSU. It comes with a Pico-PSU. They also have a 190W model but it comes with a larger internal unit, which seems to suit (out of the box) only their own enclosures. May be there are others. But why just not take a less powerful internal PSU? All these ...

The reason for higher power consumption may be that you have a much more powerful PSU than your system really needs. PSUs, as far as I know, are most efficient when you run them at approx. 80% load of their maximum.

PCIx is a superset of the old parallel PCI and has nothing to do with PCI Express (PCIe). That was just a typo. There's no x1, x4, etc for PCI-X (that is the right way to write PCIx ;) ). PCIe x16 slots are specified to supply at least 75W of power... I can only add a suggestion that may be if you ...

You could get the Atom based ITX board and then give it a PCI graphics card, like the ATI 2400 PRO. ATI 2400 PRO is a very low-end chip. I happen to have an experience with an ASUS card based on it. It even won't allow you to run 1600x1200. Mb with intel GM31 chipset + E5200 is ideal choice. I own ...

It may seem rather strange but I consider between these two MoBos for a small and silent PC. Of course MSI is much more expensive and requires Socket P CPU - again much more expensive than, say, E7200 or E8200. But for me the crucial thing is the ability to disable the on-board Intel GMA chip and in...