ASRock Also Releases Three Mini-ITX Atom Motherboards

Looks like ASRock is really up to its neck in its confusing act today, as its new motherboards, or some of them, are very peculiar. In this case, ASRock has released the AD2500B-ITX, the AD2700B-ITX and the AD2700-ITX. Indeed, those last two are almost identical in name, even though their specifications are very different. The AD2700B-ITX, for one, has a large passive heatsink covering the CPU, a small one over the NM10 chipset and two SO-DIMM slots. Two SATA 3.0 Gbps ports, for HDDs and SSDs, are present as well, along with a single PCI slot and two headers for front USB 2.0 ports. As for the back panel, the I/O options are a pair of PS/2, a serial port, a parallel port, D-sub, two USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet and two USB 3.0 connectors, plus 5.1-channel audio. The AD2700-ITX is more interesting through the single PS/2 port, four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, 7.1 audio with optical S/PDIF out, D-sub, DVI and HDMI. The GPU is listed as “Built-in Intel PowerVR SGX545” (DirectX 9.0, Pixel Shader 3.0) but it is actually made by Imagination Technologies and is dubbed either GMA 3650 or GMA 3600 (depending on the processor). The third motherboard, and weakest, is the AD2500B-ITX, which has many things in common with the AD2700B-ITX. Still, even though the board layout is more or less the same, the I/O options are still different enough, with no USB 3.0 (all four USB ports are 2.0) and 10/100 Ethernet instead of Gigabit. People who are looking for something actually powerful enough for their games will probably want to check out the X79 Extreme6/GB that also just now came out. It not only has high-end capabilities, but it comes with the Game Blaster card as well (particularly powerful Ethernet and audio).

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