Ready for your Core i7-enabled HTPC

Sep 25, 2009 07:36 GMT  ·  By

At this year's IDF 2009 event, the world's leading chip maker, Intel had a number of new products to detail. The company officially announced the debut of its much-anticipated Calpella platform, bringing the appreciated Nehalem architecture into the notebook space, but also a number of in-development projects, like the Light Peak technology. There were also a couple of products that are based on the company's chips, including a Mini-ITX board, featuring the latest LGA1156 socket, for Intel's Lynnfield processors.

The small design of the board enables HTPC enthusiasts and system builders to develop new, low-profile systems that take advantage of the performance specifications of the Core i5 and Core i7 processors. Although mini-ITX boards are more commonly built around Intel's Atom platform, said platform comes to provide a choice for a higher-performance rig. The design has been enabled by Intel's new desktop platform architecture, the H57, which offers a two-chip solution, compared to previous platforms that boasted a three-chip design.

As far as technical specifications go, the board has been designed to accommodate two DDR3 memory modules, accompanied by a Flash module slot. There are four SATA ports, a PCI-Express x16 slot for discrete graphics, Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 channel audio, eSATA connectivity, but also DVI and HDMI outputs, to provide an HTPC solution, right out of the box.

Unfortunately we have no details on when the new board will become available in the retail channel, but we might have to wait a bit, as Intel hasn't formerly introduced the H57 chipsets. However, when released, this board should become a considerable alternative for those looking to build themselves a high-performance computer system that comes in a small package and delivers the necessary features to function as an HTPC, consequently raising the performance bar compared to Atom-based nettops.