ATOM MOTHERBOARDS MIGHT not be the most exciting products around, mostly because they don’t tend to differ all that much from each other. Gigabyte’s latest Atom board, the GA-D425TUD and HA-D525TUD are some of the first Atom D425 and D525 boards we’ve seen with DDR3 memory support, with more likely to follow.
In terms of design and features, both boards are the same with the only differentiating factor being the single or dual core Atom processor. Both boards have two DDR3 memory slots, two SATA ports connection to the NM10 chipset and two additional SATA ports and an IDE port connected to a GSATA2 controller. Other features include a single PCI slot (it’s a mini-ITX board after all), four rear USB 2.0 ports, two PS/2 ports, a serial and parallel port, a D-sub connector, Gigabit Ethernet and three audio jacks. There are also two pin-headers for an additional four USB 2.0 ports on the board.
For what it’s worth, both boards feature Gigabyte’s Ultra Durable 3 board design which features a 2oz copper PCB, all solid capacitors and so on. More useful features include Gigabyte’s 3x USB power boost which delivers 1.5A per USB port instead of the regular 500mA and of course Gigabyte’s DualBIOS.
We can’t but feel that Gigabyte has missed the target market slightly, if these are intended as consumer motherboards they’re feature light. Sure, either board would work nicely as a home server, but we’d like to have seen something a bit more media centric which would require some kind of digital display output. Then again, considering that Intel has limited the resolution of any digital display interface to 1366×768, this might not have been all too useful.
We’d expect the boards to be fairly expensive, as Intel’s list price for the Atom D425 is $42 while the Atom D525 comes in at a pricey $63, even though we expect that Gigabyte is paying less than this. The GA-D425TUD should hopefully retail for sub $100, but the GA-D525TUD will most likely be retailing for well in excess of $100. We don’t have any word on when these boards will be available in retail, but we’d expect them to be shipping soon.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
Latest posts by Lars-Göran Nilsson (see all)
- AMD and Nvidia set to take on LucidLogix Virtu - Apr 7, 2011
- Notebooks and hard drives to increase in price - Apr 6, 2011
- Motherboard makers craving affordable USB 3.0 solutions - Apr 6, 2011
- IEEE approves the IEEE 802.16m standard - Apr 1, 2011
- LucidLogix scores Intel as first Virtu customer - Apr 1, 2011