ASRock Develops three Cedar Trail-Based Mini-ITX Motherboards

[Cristian_25H]

Intel's Cedar Trail platform may be ignored by US PC maker Dell but it's getting quite a bit of attention from Taiwanese company ASRock who's using it for no less than three HTPC-ready motherboards, the AD2500B-ITX, AD2700B-ITX and AD2700-ITX.

As it's evident from their name, these boards have a Mini-ITX form factor and come with a 32nm Atom processor pre-installed. The AD2500B-ITX is equipped with the Atom D2500 chip (two cores @ 1.86 GHz, 1 MB L2 cache) while the AD2700B-ITX and AD2700-ITX make use of the higher-clocked D2700 (2.13 GHz). All three models have a passive cooling solution for the CPU.





ASRock's Cedar Trail motherboards feature the Intel NM10 Express chipset, two DDR3 SO-DIMM slots (supporting up to 4 GB of RAM), two SATA 3.0 Gbps ports, one PCI slot, an Ethernet port (10/100 Mbit on the AD2500B-ITX, Gigabit for the other two), UEFI BIOS, and proprietary extras like ASRock Instant Boot, XFast USB and XFast LAN.

The AD2500B-ITX and AD2700B-ITX both include a D-Sub output and 5.1-channel audio, while the AD2700-ITX provides D-Sub, DVI and HDMI ports and 7.1-channel sound. Also the two D2700-powered boards offer two USB 3.0 connectors courtesy of an ASMedia ASM1042 controller.

These motherboards are expected to ship in the near future.

Source: VR-Zone

[JrRacinFan]

The only thing that has me not quite liking is the fact of no PCIe x16, otherwise nice.

[brandonwh64]

Originally Posted by JrRacinFan

The only thing that has me not quite liking is the fact of no PCIe x16, otherwise nice.

I thought about that too but the CPU alone wouldnt be good enough for gaming even if you did have a nice PCIex video card but then again you could use the PCIex for more than GFX

I thought about the ASRock ITX 1155 board before the one I have now but then came to the realization that it probably wouldn't OC for crap.

[DanTheBanjoman]

Originally Posted by JrRacinFan

The only thing that has me not quite liking is the fact of no PCIe x16, otherwise nice.

Even x4 or x8 would be sufficient. That would add a lot of options. Not just a videocard but storage for instance.

[THE_EGG]

Originally Posted by brandonwh64

I thought about that too but the CPU alone wouldnt be good enough for gaming even if you did have a nice PCIex video card but then again you could use the PCIex for more than GFX

I thought about the ASRock ITX 1155 board before the one I have now but then came to the realization that it probably wouldn't OC for crap.

I bought one of ASRock's ITX Z68 1155 boards today with a 2500k for a lanbox I was building and it OC's alright. I got the 2500k to a stable (so-far) 4.3ghz. Which from my point of view is pretty good for a tiny board.

[AsRock]

Originally Posted by JrRacinFan

The only thing that has me not quite liking is the fact of no PCIe x16, otherwise nice.

Yeah WTF, ya think one of them would have one at least.

[breakfromyou]

Not full sized DIMM slots either...