14 DAY TRIAL // Besides offering the D2700-DC and D2500-DC Intel Cedar Trail motherboards as standalone products, J&W has also decided to utilize these new mini-ITX boards in a new series of fanless Minix HD barebones built for home theater use.
Depending on the models that one goes for, J&W’s barebones are based on either the 1.86GHz clocked dual-core Intel Atom CPU or on its more powerful Atom D2700 brother, clocked at 2.13GHz.
Both of these chips are manufactured by Intel using 32nm process technology, and feature a unified architecture that pairs the two computing cores with a GPU based on a PowerVR design.
Thanks to this graphics core, the Cedar Trail platform features hardware decoding capabilities for a wide range of HD formats, including MPEG2, VC1, AVC, H.264 and Blu-ray 2.0.
Both D-Sub and HDMI ports are available for connecting the J&W barebones to an external monitor or HDTV.
Furthermore, J&W's new systems also include a pair of USB 3.0 ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports driven by a Broadcom IC, four regular USB 2.0 connectors, dual PS/2 ports and 5.1 channel audio.
Internally, the barebones feature two SATA 3Gbps ports, but the chassis used by J&W has only enough room for a single 2.5-inch hard drive or SSD.
As far as the system memory is concerned, J&W has decided to go with two SO-DIMM modules that can officially support 4GB of RAM, but 8GB should also work fine, according to the Minix HD brochure.
No information regarding pricing was made available so far by J&W, but we suspect these will retail for around $300 US (about 230 EUR).
Availability is also unknown at this point in time, but we’ll keep you up to date if we manage to dig up more info.