VIA debuts own EPIA N700 mainboard with VX800

After announcing it will quit making mainboard chips for third parties earlier this month, VIA Technologies on Friday announced the release of its own EPIA N700 Nano-ITX board for compact industrial PCs and embedded automation devices. The compact motherboard will ship with a choice of VIA's 1.5GHz C7 or the 500MHz Eden processor, and is the company's first Nano-ITX board to use the newest VIA VX800 media system processor chipset. Up to 2GB of DDR2 system memory is supported by the VX800 chipset. It has VIA's Chrome 9 graphics core for DirectX 9 support and video acceleration for MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV9, VC1 and DiVX video formats.

The 4.7- by 4.7-inch board incorporates VGA, USB, parallel and serial ports and Gigabit network ports as well as two USB 2.0 ports, while hard drives can be connected via two SATA interfaces. By way of on-board pin headers, more parallel and serial ports, LVDS and IDE connections can be made. Power for the N700 comes via a four-pin power cable and an external CMOS battery.

The VIA EPIA N700 will be made available to the buying public sometime in mid-September, although pricing has not been released. Developers can purchase the motherboard now.