14 DAY TRIAL // MSI’s industrial PC division has recently unveiled a new motherboard based on the Intel QM77 7-series chipset, which was specially designed to be used together with the chipmaker’s mobile Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge processors.
The motherboard adopts the mini-ITX form factor and, according to MSI, is destined to be used for digital signage, kiosk, gaming, industrial control automation and POS applications.
Just like its Intel Z77 desktop counterparts, the QM77 chipset includes the FDI interface required for utilizing the on-die GPU included in the Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors, but sports a more flexible display output configuration.
This means that besides the usual D-sub, DVI, and HDMI ports, the MSI board also comes sporting LVDS and eDP interfaces for connecting integrated displays.
Since the QM77 is an industrial motherboard designed for fanless operation, MSI also decided to drop support for regular DIMM memory and go with two SO-DIMM DDR3 slots instead.
These support a maximum of 16GB of system memory with speeds up to DDR3-1600, as long as the built-in CPU memory controller can also work at this frequency (otherwise it drops at 1333 or 1066 MHz).
The rest of the expansion options available in the QM77 provide support for a PCI Express 3.0 or 2.0 add-on card, an mSATA SSD, a miniPCIe device (such as a WiFi card) and for a maximum of two SATA 6Gbps drives.
Taking a look at the rear I/O header of the card we get to see that the MSI QM77 packs dual Gigabit Ethernet ports (driven by Intel 82579LM and 82583V controllers), HD audio thanks to a Realtek ALC887 codec, as well as RS-232/422/485 serial ports for commercial applications.
No details regarding the release date or the pricing of this motherboard were offered by MSI, but we keep our fingers crossed for the QM77 to make it into retail, since this could be a perfect choice for building a low-power HTPC system.
