VIA Technologies had a host of boards on display at ESC Boston from the standard Mini-ITX form factor to the compact Nano-ITX form factor. The big news was the new VIA EPIA SN (Fig. 1) Mini-ITX motherboard. It has a 1.8GHz VIA C7 processor, the fastest from VIA. A fanless 1GHz version is also available.
The VIA EPIA SN incorporates an x16 PCI-Express port for bandwidth-intensive graphics cards. It also has four Serial ATA II ports, an Ultra DMA port, a Compact Flash connector, four serial ports, dual-Ethernet ports (100BaseT and a Gigabit Ethernet) plus a Mini-PCI socet for wireless support. It has accelerated 2D, 3D and MPEG-2/DVD hardware support.
The board can handle up to 4Gbytes of DDR2 667 system memory. It can support DVI and LVDS displays. The motherboard includes native RAID support. Applications can take advantage of the VIA PadLock Security Engine embedded within the VIA C7 in addition to an optional TPM module.
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