here we've got a mini ITX motherboard from ASUS this is the at5 i n t-i
motherboard it features a few different things one it is fanless two it is
Slim I guess what they mean is ITX okay
it has USB 3.0 eat and it is amplifier
friendly interesting okay this is a Mini
Max so home entertainment center branded motherboard let's go ahead and flip it
over and see what it's got to say for itself on the back so it features the
Intel atom d525 dual core processor as
well as Next Generation NVIDIA ion chipset and GPU it has a silent thermal
solution with fanless heat dissipation at 0 DB okay I think that means silent
and thermal and solution Solutions are generally effective okay accelerates
heat transfer with a heat pipe design very nice bigger area for heat dissipation and completely silent so yes
it's silent got it home theater PC high definition experience if and audio yes
the NVIDIA ion Next Generation chipset is capable of accelerating highdef
decoding so that means you can watch high def content on this tiny little
fanless motherboard here we've got a users's guide along with some along with
a DVD with your drivers and utilities and all that good stuff powered by assus
sticker so throw this away accept the sticker download the latest off the
assus website we've got an IO Shield pretty much what we're used to seeing
and we have two SATA cables both of which are straight SATA cables not right
angle ones in our environmentally pack
friendly packaging we will find the motherboard next put that there and let's go ahead
and get that opened
up okay ooh that's actually pretty nice
looking okay so the first thing we notice about this is that it has an
enormous heat pipe cooler on it that not
only has fins for heat dissipation
inside but it also has through the back
of the io Shield see when you put this on it actually also has some external
access so uh I guess they're expecting you to get a little bit of you know air
flow through there to get some additional cooling so that's an
interesting approach to take to something like this okay there's our
assus logo on that heat sink it's actually quite nice looking looks uh
looks very expensive in terms of cooling solutions that I've seen on Micro ATX
motherboards in the past I got three heat pipes going on
there all right let's take a look at the layout of the rest of this board so
we've got a few fan headers that's kind of nice to see as well that's a lot of
fan headers for a Micro ATX board we got three including CPU fan although I don't
see anywhere to mount a CPU fan you could always just kind of Bolt one on
after the fact there is no four pin CPU
power connector so this is powered entirely by the 24 pin
connector we've got two sodium memory
slots so those are for oo I actually
don't know is that going to be ddr2 or DDR3 those are going to be DDR3 sodium
memory slots okay so they' got little Clips here don't need those looks like
there's an extra power port that you could they could potentially solder on
here if they need it here's a clear SEO switch here's our BIOS chip uh we've got
two SATA ports so those are SATA two ports then we've got a PCI
Express 4X slot okay but that's an open
slot so what you could potentially do I mean if you really wanted to is you
could take a full 16x card and install
it in there so I'll show you guys what I mean by an open slot so go ahead and put
that on the edge of the table and
then position the video card so that it's in the right spot there you go so I
can actually install that pull that back out and it would run
just at reduced bandwidth and obviously the atom CPU in there probably isn't
really powerful enough to really play any games with a GPU of that caliber but
yeah it just means the back of the slot is not closed off so you can install
whatever size cards you want they'll just run with reduced bandwidth we have
a USB header right here and then let's have a look at what we've got in terms
of oh here's our front audio header as well let's look at what we've got in terms of rear panel connectivity so we
have dedicated PS2 ports for mouse and keyboard we have an optical audio out
HDMI and DVI out no VGA on this particular board there's those heat
pipes we were seeing before two USB 2.0
ports an eSATA Port two USB 3.0 Port
gigabit Ethernet as well
as sorry about that and on the back we've got 5.1 audio although if you do
want to use a microphone then you'll probably be limited to just headphones
or uh 2.0 2.1 speakers here the heat
pipe cooling solution is attached via screws I like to see that it's just more
secure than push pins and I do appreciate it so thank you for checking
out my unboxing of the ASUS at
51 51 5 IO n t-i so that's the at5 I on
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