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.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[JrRacinFan]

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

 

[brandonwh64]

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.

 

[Deleted member 3]

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]

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]

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...