I definitely don’t love some of the oddball totally proprietary weirdness that shows up in the various PC OEM USFF designs, especially if you need to find some disk caddy or mezzanine option card aftermarket; but I have to admit that when I see something like a teeny little fan just waiting to die because a mITX motherboard can’t assume that every case on the market will provide airflow in a specific location I can understand that there are virtues to tighter integration.

It would be interesting to know what the costs would be in terms of inventory complexity for Asus to ship the motherboard either as-is when sold bare; or with a chassis-integrated cooling setup in a barebones configuration with their choice of mITX case.

One really cool aspect of the case.. there is a compartment that not only makes it easy to install and replace 2 2.5 SSD drives… but under one of those 2.5 drive bays is an opening that provides easy access to the m.2 slot on the bottom of the motherboard.