Industrial PC motherboards are generally not that interesting, but at least a couple of ASRock's new models could be quite suitable for HTPC usage. The company has quietly added three IPC motherboards to its range of otherwise consumer focused products and for a first attempt, the company has done a pretty good job.Going by model name we start with the IMB-140 which in many ways is the most advanced model of the three, as it sports the most impressive collection of connectivity options with two PS/2 ports, three rear serial ports – one of which has an RJ-45 interface – four USB 2.0 ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet, a pair of audio jacks, a D-sub and an HDMI connector. The board also has a pair of SATA ports – a limitation of the NM10 chipset – headers for three additional USB 2.0 ports, three serial ports and a parallel port, an LVDS connector, a mini PCI Express slot, a PCI slot, a Compact Flash card slot and two SO-DIMM slots. So in other words, very much an IPC board, something that's further enhanced by the fact that the board is powered by a 12V connector instead of a standard ATX connector.
Next up we have the IMB-141 and IMB-142, two very similar boards with only one differentiator between them. Here we're looking at a low-profile board with only two USB 2.0 ports, and one or two Gigabit Ethernet ports (this is the difference between the two models), a pair of audio jacks, an HDMI and DVI port. The boards also have headers for an additional six USB 2.0 ports, two serial ports, a D-sub connector and LVDS. As with the IMB-140 we also find a PCI slot, a mini PCI Express slot, a Compact Flash slot, two SATA ports, two SO-DIMM slots and a 12V power input.
All three models features an Atom D2700 CPU at 2.13GHz as standard with support for up to 4GB of DDR3 1066MHz memory, although the IMB-141 and IMB-142 is also available in a SKU with a mobile Atom N2800 processor at 1.86GHz. We didn't manage to locate either model for sale as yet, so it's likely that ASRock hasn't released them into the channel as yet.Source: ASRock

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