As much as we love our big, powerful PCs, we still have a soft-spot for Mini-ITX systems. However, up until now, there hasn't been much of a middle-ground between the low power-usage but lacklustre performance of an Intel Atom-based board and a socket-motherboard with a capable yet power-hungry desktop processor.
Today Zotac has announced that it's launching just the alternative by using Intel's CULV CPUs. Until now the chips have been restricted to mobile platforms, but the company has been able to pair them with NVIDIA's Ion chipset on a pair of new Mini-ITX boards.
The ION-ITX N-series will use a single-core 1.3GHz Intel Celeron 743 while the P-series features a 1.2GHz dual-core Celeron SU2300 - both of which are common in ultraportable laptops. The boards' NVIDIA Ion graphics-cores have 16 shaders and should provide more than enough power for accelerating video-playback and some light gaming.
Zotac has also outfitted the motherboards with a good number of features considering their size, including DDR3 support, eSATA, three SATA 3.0 connections and support for up to 10 USB ports. A PCIe x16 slot and a Mini-PCIe slot are also on-hand to provide expansion options, though the later will be occupied by the 802.11n WiFi module.
These new ION-equipped boards - especially the dual-core model - should offer a fairly healthy performance-boost compared to Zotac's Atom-based alternatives without drawing much more at the wall. For those looking to build a low-power system that don't want to step up to a desktop-class CPU, these motherboards could be the answer.
We don't know when these will make their way to retail, but the dual-core P-series should cost around $169 (£131 including VAT) while the N-series will launch at around $130 (£101 including VAT).
