Computex 08: Busy doing APCs
AOpen was once one of the tier one motherboard makers, but these days the company has all but disappeared from the retail market. However, the company is alive and well once again after a spate of restructuring and not doing so well in the SFF or small form factor market. Now AOpen is busy doing what they like to call APCs or application PCs.
These generally consist of mini-ITX or smaller systems in custom made cases and AOpen was showing off a range of really cool products at its headquarters during Computex. We took a quick trip over there to see what was new and we have to say that we were impressed by more than one product.
Let's start with the coolest product, at least in our opinion. AOpen had a couple of large displays showing various advertising clips and these displays are meant to be used for digital sinage purposes. However, the displays look really good, but the real corker here is that they all have a built-in modular PC. The PC module can easily be replaced if something would go wrong, and you don't have to send off the large bulky display for repair.
We'd be happy to have one of these at home, but we highly doubt that any company would ever consider selling these to end users and as they've been specifically designed for the digital sinage market, the power connector is located at the top of the display rather than the bottom. The whole unit is an in-house AOpen design and it should be available as of now for those in the business.
Since a few years ago, when AOpen and Intel joined forces and did the MODT or Mobile on the Desktop program, AOpen has been very fond of mini-ITX motherboards with support for mobile processors. AOpen was showing off a wide range of mini-ITX motherboards at its booth at Computex, but the interesting thing is that AOpen has also made a few generic cases that should work with most Atom-based motherboards.
But let's start with taking a closer look at a couple of motherboards. First up, we have an Nvidia MCP68-based motherboard for AMD processors. It has a pair of SO-DIMM memory slots and uses an external 19V power brick rather than the typical ATX power connector you normally find on these type of boards. This allows AOpen to squeeze in the large AMD socket without any problems. The board has an HDMI and D-sub connector, two PS/2 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, an Ethernet port and 7.1-channel audio around the back. It also has two SATA connectors and an IDE connector. To power drives, the board has a MOLEX connector to which you attach a cable that powers the drives.
Next up we have a couple of GM45-based motherboards; the first one is a mini-ITX board, again using an external power supply, but as you can see from the picture, the design here is quite different. This motherboard can be used with very low profile cases and has a special cooler that comes with it that keeps the CPU and chipset cool and the heatsink on the picture is just for show.
It has two SO-DIMM's, but these are flat against the board. It also has two mini PCIe slots and AOpen offers a wide range of cards for these, such as WiFi, TV-tuners etc. This board has DVI, HDMI, eSATA, Ethernet, four USB 2.0 ports and 7.1-channel audio around the back. It also has three SATA ports and a slightly different power connector.
Next we have what is an even smaller motherboard as AOpen has its own motherboard form factor for its Digital Engine systems. These motherboards measure 15x15cm, but still manage to pack a lot of features considering the size of the boards. This board only seem to lack the 7.1-channel audio and HDMI connector compared to the larger board, although as you'll notice from the picture, it doesn't have any SATA connectors either. It will still do HDMI via the DVI connector and a dongle and the small connector towards the rear of the motherboard is a special riser connector to which the drives are connected via a special adapter. This does, of course, mean that you're limited to using these motherboards with AOpen's cases, but this is hardly an issue as they're not sold on their own, anyhow.
The complete solution is the Digital Engine, and you can see a picture of the case just below. The Digital Engine was specifically designed for various application PC situations and AOpen has gained a lot of popularity in various markets with it and there's a wide range of mounting options available for it. AOpen also has a passively cooled version, called Digital Engine 2, although it works out at being slightly bigger, partly because of the cooling and partly because it uses mini-ITX motherboards instead of the smaller boards used in the Digital Engine.
