14 DAY TRIAL // The Pine Trail platform has already been adopted by virtually every hardware maker attending the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show. New netbook and nettop models make use of the latest Intel Atom chips because of their low power consumption, which enables significantly longer battery lives for laptops. Still, despite the platform working best on mobile PCs, ASUS also used it to design a mini-ITX motherboard.
The new product released by the Taiwanese hardware maker is known as the AT5NM10-I. This compact motherboard is based on the NM10 chipset and uses the Intel Atom D510 dual-core central processing unit (CPU). The motherboard has two DDR2 slots for memory capabilities and two SATA 3.0 Gbps ports for storage.
For expansion capabilities, the small form-factor motherboard is designed with a PCI slot, whereas connectivity and input/output (I/O) options include up to eight USB 2.0 ports, a D-Sub output, 5.1 channel audio and 10/100 Ethernet.
This product might be seen as slightly uncommon for ASUS, considering that the Pine Trail products it has released so far have been mostly netbooks from the Eee PC laptop family.
ASUS has a strong history as a motherboard manufacturer, controlling a 40% market share of the motherboard business. The company has, over the years, developed certain features and technologies that brought about new possibilities for overclocking, stability and power efficiency. One such technology is ASUS' exclusive EPU (energy processing unit), which controls the CPU, VGA card, memory, chipset, hard drives, and the CPU cooler/system fan. Another exclusive technology is the Express Gate, which enables a boot-up time of five seconds.
The AT5NM10-I may not be exactly performance-packed, but does feature the Express Gate instant-OS and will perform well under Windows Server home.
ASUS's CES exhibition also included gaming laptops, motherboards and other devices, such as a USB 3.0 PCIe Adapter.