Besides making its own PCBs for NVIDIA’s graphics cards, Zotac are famous for its broad assortment of mini-ITX motherboards, often targeting enthusiasts. It latest creation is called Zotac FUSION-ITX WiFi A series and comes with AMD’s Fusion APU E-350 and passive cooling.
Zotac FUSION-ITX WiFi A series is Zotac’s latest mini-ITX motherboard and this time it ahs chosen to use AMD’s Brazos platform. The motherboard has two DDR3-1066 SO-DIMM (max 8GB) slots, four SATA 6 GB/s ports, one eSATA 6 GB/s, six USB 2.0 ports, and no less than four USB 3.0 ports. Two of the USB 3.0 ports are on the I/O panel on the back, while 2 can be connected to the fron of a case, if the case supports USB 3.0.
The motherboard supports 7.1 HD audio with Dolby TrueHD and is DTS-HD Master Audio bitstream capable, and just like the name implies the board has WiFi for wireless networking. Another cute detail is the PCI-Express x4 port that is “open” for installing perhaps a graphics card that use the full length PCI-Express x16 standard. Considering the chipset ships with AMD E-350 you are limited to four PCI-E 2.0 lanes Zotac’s decision saves spaces on the board instead of having an unnecessarily long PCI-Express port.
When the board finds its way on to the market and what the final price may be is uncertain, but the popular ASUS E35M1-I Deluxe now has a worthy competitior.
