14 DAY TRIAL // While HTPC may have been a small, niche market at some point, they definitely aren't as rare now, and Zotac figured it would be good to deliver a new motherboard for that sort of thing, based on AMD technology.
While Advanced Micro Devices might not have any chip capable of battling Intel's Sandy Bridge (yet), there is no question that its existing APUs are definitely something to look out for on the low-end market.
The Ontario and Zacate chips, with their much better integrated graphics, have given netbooks and tablets based on them quite the level of performance, especially in visual tasks.
Zotac decided to push the platform a bit harder on the desktop (more or less) market as well, so it built a new mini-ITX motherboard.
The product in question is dubbed FUSION-ITX WiFi A-Series and should be more than enough for the E-350 APU (accelerated processing unit) to let itself loose.
For those that do not remember, the E-350 is a dual-core chip with a clock speed of 1.6 GHz and the Radeon HD 6310 (DirectX 11 built-in graphics.
A pair of DDR3-1066 SO-DIMM memory slots are present, so that up to a solid 8 GB of RAM (random access memory) might complement said chip.
Already the platform is shaping up to be a power-efficient, capable HTPC solution, and the rest of its specs take nothing away from its allure.
In fact, one might say that the four SATA 6.0 Gbps ports make it stand out, as do the two USB 3.0 ports and the extra one possible to add via a pin header.
Other specifications include a PCI Express x4 slot, Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 channel audio, eSATA connectivity, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and multiple display connectors (HDMI, DisplayPort and DVI).
Unfortunately, the company did not offer any sort of pricing details.