MSI Intros MS-9A58 Mini-PC for Network Security Applications

Even though most of us are accustomed to see MSI's name on notebooks, motherboards and graphics cards, the Taiwanese company also develops a wide range of industrial computer components and PCs, the latest creation to come out the gates of this department being the MS-9A58 mini-PC.

This compact and fanless system is built around an Intel Atom D525 processor with DDR3 support and integrated display interface and is designed to offer great energy efficiency while also providing top performance and rich I/O capabilities.

As many of you know, the Atom D525 was primarily developed to be used inside nettops and other small form factor desktops and sports dual processing cores, with Hyper-Threading support (can run up to four threads simultaneously), and comes clocked at 1.8GHz.

In MSI's machine, this can be paired with as much as 4GB of DDR3-800 system memory, while graphics is provided by the integrated Intel GMA 3150 GPU.

As far as connectivity is concerned, the MS-9A58 supports 4 Intel 82574L Gigbait LAN Ports as well as a pair of SATA 3Gbps ports for connecting various storage devices.

Users who require even more expandability will be glad to hear that MSI's industrial PC also includes two PCI slots, one PCI Express x1 slot and one mini-PCIe slot, while it can also be fitted with a built-in WiFi 802.11b/g/n module.

Moving to the back of the unit, consumers will find one RS-232 and one RS-232/422/485 serial ports with auto-flow control, two COM ports as well as no less than six USB 2.0 ports.

According to MSI, all these features make the MS-9A58 a great option for being used in network security applications, such as small business VPN (Virtual Private Network ), VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol ), SAN (Storage Area Network) and NAS (Network Attached Storage ).

MSI hasn't provided us with any information regarding pricing or availability.