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MSI announces IPC Atom N270 motherboard

by on30 September 2008

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Uses mobile components


MSI might not be the biggest player in the IPC (Industrial PC) market, but its new IM-945GSE motherboard might get them a few new customers based on its rather unusual design. Rather than using the desktop Atom 230, MSI has gone for a mobile Atom N270, as it runs at 2.5W instead of 4W, and as such MSI has created a passively cooled system.

The chipset is the Intel 945GSE, so there's nothing much to get excited about when it comes to chipset features, but MSI has done some unusual design tweaks to this mini-ITX board. In terms of expansion slots you're looking at a standard PCI slot, but MSI has also added a Mini Card slot which accepts notebook style PCIe x1 cards, which allow for features such as WiFi, Bluetooth or even TV-tuners to be added.

The board has a single SO-DIMM slot that takes DDR2 memory and the board has two SATA ports as well as an IDE connector. Around the back the design is quite different, as well, with MSI having added a DVI port and a pair of Gigabit network ports. There are also two serial ports here and up to another four can be connected via headers on the motherboard, a D-sub connector, four USB 2.0 ports and three audio jacks.

MSI offers versions of the board that either power off an ATX power connector or via DC power; and there's a version that supports LVDS. The DC powered versions lacks the second Ethernet port and one serial port and the LVDS model doesn't support DVI, although both of the DC powered models are lower profile than the one that uses a standard ATX power connector.

You can find the product page here.
Last modified on 01 October 2008
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