VIA Launches VB8002 Mini-ITX Board for Media Servers

VIA Technologies, a company that is known for its innovative power-efficient x86 processor platforms, has announced today the introduction of a new platform designed to take advantage of the performance delivered by its Nano processors. The new board, dubbed VIA BB8002, comes in a Mini-ITX form factor and is focused on the growing market for media server products. According to the chip maker, this new board offers a balance between performance and power-efficiency, meant to help users who are looking for a capable home media server.

“The VIA Nano processor is ideally suited to server applications that require superb performance in tandem with great power efficiency,” said Daniel Wu, vice president, VIA Embedded Platform Division, VIA Technologies, Inc. “We are convinced that the VIA VB8002 board will be applauded by system integrators as the most well balanced, feature-rich media server platform available.”

VIA's new VB8002 Mini-ITX board is equipped with an integrated 1.6GHz Nano processor and the CX700M2 media system processor. Additionally, the board is featured with an onboard HDTV encoder, meant to provide support for high-definition video resolutions and HD audio. As far as performance goes, the board also offers support for 1GB of RAM memory, on the available DDR2 memory DIMM.

The board is also featured with the integrated VIA UniChrome Pro II 3D/2D AGP graphics with support for MPEG-2/4 and WMV9 decoding acceleration. There's a PCI slot, one UltraDMA connector, two USB pin connectors for four additional USB 2.0 ports, two SATA connectors and one PS2 mouse/keyboard header. On the backpanel, the board offers one DVI connector, one RJ-45 with USB stack 2.0 connector, one miniDIN for S-Video output, one triple RCA jack for composite video and stereo audio outputs and one that is meant for component video output. There's also a coaxial and optical S/PDIF connector.

With support for Windows 2000 and XP, CE, Linux operating systems, the board offers an impressive number of features in a Mini-ITX form factor. Unfortunately, VIA hasn't detailed the pricing and availability of the new VB8002.