J&W has surprised everyone by launching a mini-ITX motherboard based on the AMD 780G chipset and it's very likely that this is the best mini-ITX motherboard ever made, at least if you want a solution for an HTPC. The board goes under the name of MINIX-780G-SP128MB, or just simply MINIX.

To improve the performance of the IGP, J&W has somehow managed to squeeze in 128MB of side-port memory, but sadly it's only DDR2, rather than GDDR3 which we've seen on some 780G boards. Nonetheless, it should provide for a healthy performance boost, and this way the IGP doesn't have to share system memory in less graphics memory intensive tasks.

The rear I/O consists of a wealth of ports as well, including a PS/2 port. six USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, DVI, D-sub, optical and coaxial S/PDIF, 7.1-channel audio jacks, eSATA and Gigabit Ethernet. The board also has four SATA connectors, an IDE connector and headers for a further four USB 2.0 ports.

But this isn't all, as J&W has also managed to squeeze in a x16 PCIe slot, which means that if you're not happy with the integrated graphics, or if you're looking at building one seriously small gaming PC, then you could fit just about any standard graphics card into this slot.

The only real compromise that J&W has done is the memory slots, as the board relies on SO-DIMM's rather than standard DIMM slots, but the board will accept DDR2 800MHz SO-DIMM's.

Sadly, we don't know when the MINIX will hit retail, nor do we have a price for the board at this point, but fingers crossed, it'll be cheaper than equivalent mATX boards.

You can find more details here.