Mystery MSI Mini-ITX Board Makes Appearance

Along its consumer-oriented products, MSI also designs and manufactures a wide selection of industrial and embedded motherboards, and recently, what appears to be such a board made its appearance on the web.

The mainboard's picture was uncovered by the VR-Zone website, and, unfortunately, isn't accompanied by any hardware specifications.

However, as far as we can tell, the motherboard runs a low-power CPU (most probably an Intel Atom chip), which is cooled by an aluminum heatsink, and features a mini-ITX form factor.

The mystery board also features a pair of SO-DIMM memory slots, a PCI Express x1 expansion slot and is powered via a regular 24-pin ATX connector.

Storage is provided by six SATA ports, an additional eSATA connector making its way onto the rear I/O panel, where it's also accompanied by dual Ethernet ports as well as by two SuperSpeed USB 3.0 (via a Renesas controller) and a pair of USB 2.0 ports.

One of the two Ethernet ports is driven by an on-board Intel NIC controller and, presumably, supports Gigabit Ethernet connections.

No display interface is present on the back of the board, but taking a close look at the printed circuit board (PCB) reveals a pin-header labeled JVGA1 which suggests that a monitor can be attached.

This strange omission, as well as the impressive number of storage connections available, leads me to believe that MSI's board is destined to be used inside NAS solutions or other similar storage devices which require a wide number of drives to be attached as well as RAID functionality.

In addition, such a mainboard could be used for powering home storage servers, such as HP's line of MediaSmart machines or Acer's Aspire Easystore device, which is actually based on an Atom 1.6GHz CPU with 2GB of RAM and the Windows Home server operating system.