Zotac working on Ion Based Mini-ITX mainboards

Looks like Zotac is really going to jump on the ION bandwagon after all. EXpreview brings us news that Zotac is hard at work on their new Mini-ITX Ion based mainboard.

The new board looks like it will have everything needed for the small ION Based Nettops that could be cluttering the shelves soon. Wireless, the nVidia 9400M G, Three SATA ports, Two RAM slots and HDMI/DVI/VGA ports.

The interesting thing is no expansion slots, not even a single PCI-e 1x port. Makes for a very closed system. Many have asked if this is really a feasible platform as you can get a full C2D E6350 on a Mini-ITX board with a lower (and half-height) GPU with more power and for less than these initial ION systems will cost.

Either way the introduction of ION into the Netbook/Top waters will be interesting to watch.

Read more here.

The IONITX-A-U and IONITX-B-E come with Atom N330 Dual Core and Atom N230 Single Core processor respectively, and they both feature MCP79 chipset and built-in GeForce 9400 graphics processor to support PureVideo HD, CUDA and PhysX technologies. Equipped with HDMI, DVI and VGA outputs, they offer two DDR2 memory slots to support maximum DDR2-800. As we can see, the CPU and GPU share a large aluminum cooling rib with an eye toward total quietness.

Zotac IONITX-A-U and IONITX-B-E will be available first in Japan at Yen29980 (US$303) and Yen19980 (US$202) respectively.