14 DAY TRIAL // Mini-ITX motherboards have been coming out quite often in these recent years, owing to the hiking demand for nettops, Chromeboxes, and other mini PCs, as well as embedded systems.
Gigabyte has just launched one such mini-ITX platform, called H81N-D2H and based on the H81 chipset, hence the name.
With the H81 chipset comes support for the LGA1150 socket. Pin-compatible with this socket are Intel's Core-series Haswell central processing units, as well as Devil's Canyon chips.
Most of the good ones will be wasted on this mainboard though, especially since overclocking is not supported. Celeron and Pentium chips are better suited here, despite the potential of the two DDR3 DIMM memory slots.
On that note, the small motherboard also boasts a pair of SATA 6.0 Gbps ports, the same number of SATA 3.0 Gbps connectors, PS/2, LPT and COM (via headers), and USB 3.0 (two ports). Four USB 2.0 connectors, 6-channel HD audio, and Gigabit Ethernet round up the specs sheet.
Everything gets power via a 24-pin ATX and 4-pin CPU power connectors (3-phase VRM conditioning power for the CPU) and is driven by UEFI BIOS. Alas, a price has not been provided yet. No doubt it will be subject to negotiation, since bulk orders (as are common in the embedded market) tend to be good practice grounds for man's haggle skill.