It is made for point-of-sale and kiosk PC builds, but not only

Feb 19, 2014 08:12 GMT  ·  By

Consumer-oriented processors and motherboards don't seem to be coming out in great numbers lately, unlike graphics cards, but that doesn't mean the IT companies are idle. Gigabyte has just showed they aren't by launching the J1900N-D3V.

J1900N-D3V is the product name of the newest mini-ITX motherboard from Gigabyte. The motherboard that also happens to be one of the first in the world powered by Intel's new quad-core Celeron J1900 SoC. Hence the name of the platform.

The SoC (system-on-chip) has four x86-64 CPU cores clocked at 2 GHz, which is a lot for a mini-ITX motherboard aimed at industrial and point-of-sale applications. And kiosks.

Then again, four cores are a lot in those situations, though they won't be for long. The volumes of data that need to be processed, even at supermarket pay stands, is always growing.

Anyway, the J1900N-D3V has two DDR3 SO-DIMM memory slots, which can hold modules of up to 8 GB each, with dual-channel DDR3-1333 support included.

The mini-ITX motherboard gets a legacy PCI slot as well, although the mini-PCI Express 2.0 x1 slot will no doubt be used for the more strenuous things.

Two SATA 3 ports are also included (SATA 6.0 Gbps), as well as an LPT parallel port (by header), two RS232 serial COM ports, PS/2 keyboard/mouse ports, 6-channel HD audio, SuperSpeed USB 3.0 (four ports), and two display outputs: D-Sub and DVI.

Everything gets power from 24-pin ATX and 4-pin CPU power connectors, and is driven by the AMI UEFI BIOS technology.

In fact, Gigabyte even tossed in the Dual-UEFI technology, which keeps a BIOS as backup in case you change too many things in the main BIOS and need to roll back to the original state.

Finally, not just one but two Gigabit Ethernet ports were included in the design of the Gigabyte J1900N-D3V. Sadly, the company didn't say what price the newcomer sports. Probably because its customers will need to haggle over them. They will be mostly bought in bulk after all.