VIA Technologies this week previewed their EPIA EX, a Mini-ITX motherboard firmly aimed at the media playback market. The C7-powered board has a feature that has been lacking on all previous EPIA boards to date: a DVI output.
VIA had a 1.5GHz protoype board on their stand, running Windows CE booted from a 256MB IDE Flash module. A new CX700M2 chipset features Unichrome Pro II 2D/3D graphics with MPEG2/4 and WMV9 acceleration. A VT1708 high definition audio codec provides 6 channel audio and a VT1625M HDTV encoder drives the TV output.
The board on display looked to have optical audio, S/PDIF, 6x 3.5mm audio jacks, DVI output, S-Video, Gigabit LAN and 2x USB 2.0 sockets. The PCI slot is still present, with one DDRII memory slot and 2x SATA and 1x IDE socket for storage.
We don't expect to see the EX in the immediate future - VIA have several other new C7 motherboards to keep them occupied first - but we'll certainly be interested in checking out the playback capabilities of the new CX700M2 chipset.
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