Saturday, July 5th 2008
MSI Looks to Compete with VIA Pico-ITX, Rolls out MS-7314 Wind-Board
The competition heats up with compact-computing. MSI has released a special motherboard which could compete with the VIA Pico-ITX board. This compact motherboard has a hardwired Intel Atom N230 processor clocked at 1.60 GHz that is passively cooled by an aluminum heatsink, it shares this heatsink with a Intel 945GC northbridge that's the core-logic used accompnied with a ICH7 southbridge. It features an integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 and Realtek ALC 888HD audio.
While the board doesn't feature an onboard PSU unlike the offering from VIA, it features two DDR2 slots for DDR2 667/533 MHz, two SATA II ports, an IDE connector, ports arranged in the standard ATX fashion. A PCI slot is provided. The board features onboard ethernet along with 6-channel audio. This board has started selling in Japan, where it's priced at approx. US $95 and measures 19cm x 17cm.
Source:
iXBT
While the board doesn't feature an onboard PSU unlike the offering from VIA, it features two DDR2 slots for DDR2 667/533 MHz, two SATA II ports, an IDE connector, ports arranged in the standard ATX fashion. A PCI slot is provided. The board features onboard ethernet along with 6-channel audio. This board has started selling in Japan, where it's priced at approx. US $95 and measures 19cm x 17cm.
11 Comments on MSI Looks to Compete with VIA Pico-ITX, Rolls out MS-7314 Wind-Board
PCIe16 is not needed. This will never be used as a power games machine due to atom. It's for embedded industrial designs, fileservers, webservers, mediaservers, control applications, internet terminals, or "Secretary's PC"
VIA, Jetway, Intel, and other manufacturers have MiniITX and slightly larger boards which would be direct competitors to this.
Oh well, it will still make a good upgrade to my current server :D.
Na but I had the same problem as you. Thankfully, I had no use for a second PCI slot....but you can get those PCI riser/expander cards (1 PCI slot --> 2 PCI slots)
More or less, this is useless for a HTPC. Its peachy for an office box, or cheap netbox however.
good thing it has a parallel port so i can use my dot matrix printer.