Based on Intel's Cedar trail platform, but with Nvidia graphics

Jan 12, 2012 15:10 GMT  ·  By

Adding to a never-ending portfolio of mini-ITX motherboards, Zotac has now released the Intel Atom Cedar Trail powered D2700-ITX WiFi Supreme board that was designed to meet the needs of HTPC enthusiasts.

Just as its name implies, this compact motherboard is built around an Atom D2700 Cedarview processor, and pairs together the dual-core 2.13GHz x86 CPU with an Nvidia GT 520 graphics card packing 512MB of DDR3 VRAM.

Both of these are cooled by an active heatsink that covers most of the PCB space available on the board, forcing the company to drop support for DIMM memory and go instead with the smaller SO-DIMM modules that are usually found inside notebooks.

Two such slots are provided offering users the capability to install up to 4GB of system memory, while the rest of the expansion options include two SATA 3Gbps ports and a PCI Express x16 slot (PCIe x1 electrically).

An additional mini-PCIe slot is also available, but this is occupied by an 802.11 b/g/n WiFi card.

To the rear of the D2700-ITX WiFI, Zotac has installed all the I/O ports that are required for an HTPC system, including all the important DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs.

But these are only the tip of the iceberg, as the motherboard also comes equipped with dual USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port and with 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out.

“Zotac platforms have been quite popular among home theater PC users,” said Carsten Berger, marketing director, Zotac International.

“The Zotac D2700-ITX WiFi Supreme succeeds our award-winning IONITX series with upgrades to smoothly playback stereoscopic 3D content, output lossless audio formats and embrace Microsoft DirectX 11 technology while maintaining the compact mini-ITX form factor,” concluded the company’s rep.

Sadly, no information regarding pricing and availability was disclosed by Zotac at this time, but the solution is on display at CES 2012.