Weve managed to dig out a few details of an upcoming mini-ITX motherboard from Asus featuring Intels Atom D2500 processor and although this isnt the most exciting platform in the world, Asus has created something a little bit different. In fact, anyone looking at building a home server with some fancy features might just want to consider this board.
The model name is D25NM10-I/CSM and its quite different from the boards weve seen from ASRock, as Asus is targeting quite a different market segment. In reality this ought to be an industrial PC motherboard judging by the fact that it has an LVDS connector, five serial ports (of which two are RS422/485 compatible) and even a pin header for a parallel port. However, Asus has also included a PCI Express x1 and a mini PCI Express expansion slot, a DVI port and a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports making this an interesting solution for a home server.
Other features include an on-board DC-DC converter, 5.1-channel audio, a pair of SATA ports, a total of eight USB 2.0 ports (four via two headers), a PS/2 port, a D-sub connector and a pin header for S/PDIF out. Sadly we dont have a picture of the board, but we can imagine it being a fairly cramped board considering the amount of features Asus has squeezed in. Intel has finally allowed for up to 4GB of 1066MHz DDR3 RAM to be supported by its Atom processors and this further makes this a decent little server board.
The CPU is passively cooled and with an external power adapter theres no noise from the PSU either. The only limitation as far as a server is concerned is the two SATA ports, but at least a PCI Express RAID card could be connected to the PCI Express slot if need be. The question is how much Asus is planning on charging for this board, as we have a feeling itll be quite expensive due to all the industrial PC features, but we might be wrong here. No word on when itll be available, but wed expect it to arrive shortly.
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