J&W give HTPC builders new Cedar Trail based mITX options

J&W has now jumped on the Cedar Trail bandwagon in releasing a pair of mini-ITX motherboards for HTPC users in particular.

Falling under the company’s Minix line, the D2700-DC and D2500-DC are essentially the same board in terms of layout and specs, only they differ in the Atom chips embedded as indicative by their names. The D2500-DC uses Intel’s dual-core Atom D2500 CPU which runs at 1.86GHz, while the D2700-DC uses the Atom D2700 CPU with a 2.13GHz core clock speed.

Both boards are entirely passive cooled (using a chunk of metal that covers most of the PCB space) which is a highly attractive attribute in line of building a completely silent HTPC. To assist in the limited amount of space available on these mITX boards, the decision to go with two SO-DIMM memory slots instead of regular DIMM slots was made. On that subject, it’s possible to install up to 8GB 2 x 4GB) of memory on these boards.

Other features of the boards include two SATA 3Gbps ports, a PCI-E x1 slot, two USB 3.0 ports on the rear I/O thanks to the implementation of a third party (Renesas) controller, four USB 2.0 ports, dual PS/2 ports, dual Gigabit LAN ports and 5.1 audio support. Both D-Sub and HDMI outputs are also found on these boards along with a DC power input which allows the system to be powered using an external AC/DC adapter.

Pricing and availability details are yet to be disclosed on the Minix D2700-DC and D2500-DC mini-ITX motherboards from J&W.

In related news, the company is also planning to release to market a barebone PC based on these new boards. Measurements for it come in at 192 x 186 x 60mm which isn’t as small as some nettops out there, but for one using an mITX motherboard it’s not too shabby at all. There’s room for a 2.5-inch HDD/SSD inside and it will ship with a VESA mount.