THE VIA NANO CPU has been out for quite some time now, but we haven’t seen a lot of products based on it so far. We spotted an interesting mini ITX board over at Gigabyte that will hopefully find its way into some interesting devices such as media players/HTPCs in the near future.
The board is called the GA-M7V90DI and is made by Gigabyte’s server and embedded platforms division. It’s not the most feature packed motherboard we’ve ever seen, but it’s the first motherboard we’ve seen with VIA’s VX900 chipset which was launched in late March this year. It offers support for a wide range of new features and offers hardware accelerated playback of just about every video format you can throw at it.
The board in question doesn’t have a lot of fancy features, as it only sports a single SO-DIMM slot, a mini PCIe slot and two SATA ports. However, it also has an HDMI port, a pair of Ethernet ports, four USB 2.0 ports with two headers for an additional four ports, a D-sub connector, three audio jacks and a serial port. It’s powered by an external power brick and we’d expect this board to run very cool and as such it should fit into some seriously slim cases.
This looks like a great alternative to an Atom based mini ITX board, especially as the VIA chipset offers far superior media playback capabilities without the need for any costly additions such as an HD video decoder or Nvidia’s ION graphics. Sadly this board is unlikely to end up in retail, but some specialist suppliers will hopefully get stock of it in the not too distant future.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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