VIA launches the VE-900 mini-ITX kit

Andrew Brush 14 Nov, 2011 at 2:26pm ET Article published in Tech

The modest looking VE-900

Coming in close to the 10th anniversary of the format and billed as a “motherboard for digital home media DIY enthusiasts”, VIA have paired their Nano™ X2 1.4ghz dual-core CPU with their VX900 chipset to produce an intriguing addition to their mini-ITX lineup.

The VE-900 is certainly no slouch—the Nano X2 at its heart has a pair of 64bit Isaiah cores clocked at a respectable 1.4GHz and the VX900 “Media System Processor” features the ChromotionHD 2.0 video engine, offering hardware acceleration for VC1, H.264, MPEG-2 and WMV9 HD formats at up to 1080p.

On the rear panel you have the usual Gigabit LAN, HDMI, USB 2.0 and audio jacks, but in a somewhat strange display of fondness for legacy connectors, the board retains PS2, VGA and serial ports as well as an internal header for an LPT connector—not something many people will use, but for a select few using, for the sake of example, older home automation hardware or cases with VF displays they could prove very useful. Internally the board also has two SATA ports, headers for front audio/USB, a PCI slot and two DDR3 RAM slots which accept up to 8GB in regular DIMMs.

VIA have already begun selling the VE-900, and those of you in the US you can pick one up from the VIA online store for $89 which seems a not unreasonable price given what’s on offer.

Comments

14 Nov 2011 ~ 5:31pm Rami Now, can anyone recommend a nice mini-ITX case?
14 Nov 2011 ~ 5:41pm Basil Anything you like the look of from CFI on the low end up to something like Fractal's Array R2 on the high end.
14 Nov 2011 ~ 6:02pm Mt_Goat

Rami wrote:

Now, can anyone recommend a nice mini-ITX case?

I have been leaning toward getting one of the LIAN LI PC-Q08A cases but not sure which color. They come in black, silver and red.
14 Nov 2011 ~ 7:21pm Oli Warner It's such a shame their Linux graphics drivers are so awful. They keep pretending they're going to open source them one day and never do... All the time while not updating them themselves.
14 Nov 2011 ~ 7:49pm Thrax Sugo SG05B
15 Nov 2011 ~ 9:00am drasnor Looks like they have their eye on the embedded industrial market. You might call serial and parallel legacy, but new industrial peripherals are made using those interfaces every day.
15 Nov 2011 ~ 10:31am BuddyJ

Thrax wrote:

Sugo SG05B

+1

Silverstone rules the mITX market.
15 Nov 2011 ~ 10:40am Basil Micheal Fox says outright that VIA aren't aiming for the embedded market with this.

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/dMkP4d1Bdms?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

They're playing it up as "the ideal platform for DIY enthusiasts to custom build stylish home desktop and media center PCs".

I know serial/parallel ports are still used and will continue to be for years but they are legacy ports, that's not a perjorative just a fact.
15 Nov 2011 ~ 11:53am Thrax I'd like to see some HQV scores, and a list of supported HW-accelerated codecs+bitrates before I have any faith.