The jury's still out on whether or not HTPCs are ready for the mainstream, but boards like this are certainly helping the argument:
That's ASUS's AT5IONT-I, a mini-ITX board that on the face of things appears to fuse all of the components you'd want in a living-room system.
At the heart of the board, you get a dual-core, hyper-threaded 1.8GHz Intel Atom D525 processor that although unlikely to win many races should be plenty potent for HTPC use.
Though, we say that knowing that the low-power Intel chip is paired with NVIDIA's second-generation ION graphics. Armed with 16 CUDA cores, 512MB of video memory hooked up to a 64-bit interface, hardware video acceleration and support for DX10.1, it's the GPU portion of the board that touts high-def multimedia credentials and basic gaming potential.
All that's cooled by a large passive heatsink, and two DDR3 SODIMM slots provide room for up to 4GB of memory.
Elsewhere, you get a PCIe x4 expansion slot, integrated 7.1 channel Realtek ALC887 audio, two SATA connectors, Gigabit Ethernet and built-in Wireless N. Not bad for a board that measures just 170mm x 170mm.
And the list of niceties doesn't end there. The rear I/O provides a choice of HDMI or DVI outputs, as well as optical S/PDIF for your audio, and you get eSATA and four USB ports - two of which are of the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 variety.
Interested? ASUS tells us the board should be showing up at retailers any day now priced at around £125.
