It appears to be the season of small Atom powered motherboards, as not only has J&W launched its nano ITX Atom D2700/D2500 models, but the company has also announced a pair of more consumer friendly mini ITX models in its Minix series of motherboards featuring the same processors. Both models are passively cooled and have a few quirks that make them interesting as an HTPC solution.The high-end model is the Minix D2700-HD and as the model name gives away, it features a dual-core hyper threaded 2.13GHz Atom D2700 processor. It has a pair of SO-DIMM slots which accepts up to 4GB of DDR3 1066MHz memory. The expansion slot on this board is a x1 PCI Express slot which is a welcome addition, as so many Atom boards tend to feature a PCI slot. Other on board features include a pair of SATA ports, a Molex connector for power to the SATA ports, two USB 2.0 headers for an additional four USB 2.0 ports, an LVDS header and a parallel port and serial port header.Around the back we find a 12V DC power input, a pair of PS/2 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports courtesy of a pair of Broadcom controllers, 5.1-channel audio and a D-sub and HDMI port. Sadly the board is missing S/PDIF out, but there's a header on the board that could be used if you have a suitable attachment.The more affordable sibling is called the Minix D2500-HD and here we're looking at a slightly reduced feature set. For starters this board uses the slightly slower 1.86GHz dual core Atom D2500 which sports somewhat more basic graphics, but still handles up to 4GB of DDR3 1066MHz memory. J&W has also dropped the USB 3.0 ports and the second Ethernet port from this model, but otherwise it should be identical in terms of features. Sadly we have no word on pricing or availability of these boards.Source: J&W
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