Jetway launches VIA Nano motherboard

Larger than mini ITX, not quite a mini DTX

JETWAY IS A COMPANY that likes to create unusual boards and its latest addition, the MVB-VX9GSM stands out not only because it uses a VIA Nano CPU and the VX900 chipset, but also because it uses a rather unusual form factor. At 190x170mm this board is what we could only describe as an extended mini ITX board, as it doesn’t quite fit AMD’s now defunct mini DTX standard despite having two expansion slots.

Jetway has gone for a single core VIA Nano L2007 CPU which is clocked at 1.6GHz and has a TDP of 25W not counting the VX900 chipset. It’s not exactly a high-end solution, but this board offers some interesting features. For starters it has two DDR3 DIMM slots, a feature in itself that isn’t too common when it comes to VIA hardware and the board supports up to 4GB of DDR3 1066MHz memory. Add to that a PCI Express x16 slot as well as a single PCI slot and you’ve got a fairly good starting point. It’s worth noting that the chipset is limited to provide eight lanes worth of bandwidth to the x16 slot, but this is more than AMD’s recently launched Brazos platform offers.

Around the back you’ll find six USB 2.0 ports, a D-sub and HDMI port, a 10/100Mbit Ethernet port and three audio jacks for 5.1-channel audio. The board also has a pair of SATA ports and additional headers for two USB 2.0 ports and a serial port. Overall this board would make for an interesting home server or potentially a low cost HTPC solution and the only real downside we can see is the tiny fan that helps cool the CPU. A larger, passive cooler would’ve been favorable here, but it seems like Jetway decided it would’ve been too costly. We have no word on availability or cost, but judging by the features we’d expect this board to retail for well under $100 as this is a consumer board rather than an industrial PC board.S|A

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