May 24th, 2007Gigabyte Prepares a New Form Factor
DTX, anyone?
With the fast approaching need for networked home storage, and the desire to house these devices in ever-smaller casings so they hide better in the closet, Gigabyte has announced plans to release the first mini DTX motherboard. Codenamed “Churchill” (after Sir Winston, perhaps?), this motherboard will be catered towards the home server market and acts as a base for AMD’s Live! Home Media Server platform.
This board will support AMD’s Socket AM2 Athlon 64 and Sempron processors (single and dual-core, no word on the Phenom yet), and makes use of a relatively cheap SiS north and south bridge. With 8 USB ports and six SATA I spots (5 internal, one external), there’s plenty of room for growth. What I really like about this is that Windows Home Server is going to be a great platform to run on this board. Other NAS options such as FreeNAS and OpenSolaris would also find many advantages with this tiny little board, and the potential power that it offers (both of these are great solutions for those who might want to share files between Windows, Mac, and Linux).
Mini DTX is roughly the same size as mini ITX. What makes this board more appealing than the ITX counterparts is the ability to use desktop-PC processors, and the fact that the mounting brackets will work in most cases ranging from mini ATX to full sized ATX. The single PCI slot is great for people who want to have a real RAID card in place, or perhaps a SATA II card to replace the slower first generation connections. I would think that since most media streams fine over a 54 MBit connection (802.11g), the first generation SATA connections would be fine for starting users. People that need a bit more performance from their servers are typically resigned to the fact that they need to spend more to quench their thirst for speed and availability.
Gigabyte expects to release this board sometime in July, and pricing has not yet been determined. For anyone who’s been planning on building a small home storage server in a small form factor box, this could be a pretty good launching point.
Now if they were to make one on an Intel platform ….
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