14 DAY TRIAL // At this year's Computex fair, Zotac showcased its first motherboard built around the Intel Z68 chipset, the Z68-ITX WiFi, and recent reports claim that the Chinese company is finally getting ready to ship this solution to its partners.
The Z68-ITX WiFi is built around the mini-ITX form factor and the Intel Z68 chipset, which makes it compatible with Intel's second-generation Core processors that use the LGA 1155 socket.
CPU power is delivered via a 6+1+1 phase power design that uses Dr. MOS capacitors to provide stable voltages no matter the power requirements placed on the PWM.
Right under the CPU socket, Zotac has installed two full-length DIMM slots that can house up to 8GB of DDR3-1333 memory in a dual-channel configuration.
The rest of the expansion options include a PCI Express x16 slot, a mini PCIe x1 slot, that is populated by a WiFi 802.11 b/g/n WLAN card, and four SATA ports. Two of these support speeds of 6Gbps, while the other two are limited at 3Gbps.
Taking a look at the rear I/O header, we find that Zotac has included a wide series of connectors, including four USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports, a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports, and 5.1-channel audio (Realtek ALC892) with an optical S/PDIF out.
Video connectors include two HDMI ports and a mini-DisplayPort interface.
The entire board is passively cooled, and Zotac also fitted it with on-board Power and Reset buttons, a BIOS debug LCD as well as with a rear Clear CMOS button.
The Z68-ITX WiFi will be bundled together with the Lucid Virtu software, to let users combine the high-speed transcoding capabilities of Intel's Quick Sync engine with the power of a dedicated graphics card, and also offers SSD caching support through Intel's RST technology.
The recommended retail price of the Zotac Z68-ITX WiFi motherboard isn't known at this time. (via Expreview)