ITX vs. Laptop

Heya guys,

I'm hoping some of you can chyme in on a thought I found myself with. I'm not going to go into great detail on the "project" this involves as that will be coming in a thread of its own but making a long story short I have found myself questioning the validity of the ITX form factor...

My conundrum is simple, my original plan involved using multiple ITX systems (AMD E-350's) but while researching my options and working out designs my laptop started acting up so I made a little diversion to see what the current portable market looks like and much to my amazement I can buy a full blown E-350 laptop for less than I would need to spend on getting the exact same thing in the ITX form factor.

Let's say I built an ITX system on the cheap, 75$ for the mobo/cpu, 20$ for memory, 50$ for the hard drive, 100$ for windows 7 and let's say 50$ for a power supply, that works out to be about 300$ before shipping and taxes and all that, so let's say 350$ all included... For 350$ I can pop over to Best Buy or Futureshop and pickup an e-350 laptop, heck for 100$ more I can get one with an a6-3400m in it...

When you consider the performance of an E-350 isn't going to change much regardless of form factor (performance just isn't what these things are designed for) I find myself wondering why I would even consider an ITX system these days. I dunno, maybe I'm missing something.

My original concept was to design the chassis around the ITX form factor for size/cluster density, low power consumption and future upgrade "path" but by my logic I could just as easily buy a bunch of cheap notebooks and string them together for pretty much the same performance and cost, the only real difference is the notebooks come with their own keyboard, trackpad, monitor and 4+ hour battery backup... None of which is included in my ITX cost.

Is there something wrong with my perception of the situation or does spending 300$+ on ITX rigs seem a little silly when you could buy a complete notebook with the same performance for the same price?

the only problem with that is that the only sub $300 notebooks i've seen with the amd e-350 are acers. personally i wouldn't take an acer if it was given to me.

Yeah you can't get anything sub 300$ that's worth a damn yet but then again the ITX system wouldn't really fall under 300 either and in the 300-400 range there are E-350 options from pretty much all the big names, some you might need to catch on sale but either way like I said I can walk over to Best Buy, slap down 350$ and have a full laptop, or I could buy the exact same thing in the ITX form factor... Just seems messed up to me.