The Board

Ok, first things first. This is a small board. It also already has the CPU/GPU built onto it. It is going to appear cramped and limited in its layout. However, looking at the board from the stand point of usage, ZOTAC has done a pretty good job of getting things organized.

One of the first things that you will notice on the NM10-DTX is the large heatsink that is mounted to the board. This is to keep the D510 cool. As you can see from the shot below, it is large chunk of metal for that tiny little processor. But the upside of this is that you do not need to use a fan with this to keep things cool.

The next thing that caught our attention was the internal mini-wireless adapter. This was a little surprising as we would have thought that the board would have used an integrated chip and not an adapter like this. However, this type of setup does make for very thorough disabling of the wireless adapter (if you wanted to use a third party adapter.).

The "lower-half" of the board contains a single x16 and x1 PCIe slot. You can also see the Realtek audio codec for the analogue audio.

One thing that is both interesting and annoying is the SATA ports. As you can see, there are six visible. The two ports that are red are listed as the SATA RAID ports while the black ones are connected to the J-Micron JMB324 controller.

What this means to you is that you will need to plug your boot drives (and CD/DVD-ROM) into the red ports for the system to recognize them. Otherwise you will have some pretty serious issues with installation.

The ports on the board are pretty standard. The HDMI output is going to be capped at 720p due to limitation on the 3150 GPU on the Atom Pineview.

In general ZOTAC has done a pretty good job of keeping things clean and uncluttered. You have access to everything you need easily, even if you decide to drop in an extra GPU.