Pico-ITX Motherboard: Smaller than a hard drive

Unless you are a big fan of small form-factor computing, you probably haven’t been tracking the development of VIA’s Pico-ITX motherboards. This form-factor was announced at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, but it has been almost impossible to get your hands on an ITX motherboard and the official U.S. release has yet to happen. A few samples have made their way to reviewers and developers, but because of their rarity coverage has been sparse.

If you are not familiar with Pico-ITX, all you have to know is it is a newer and smaller motherboard size than what we have seen before. A full-sized ATX motherboard is 12″ x 9.6″ (305mm x 244mm) and Mini-ITX is 17cm x 17xcm, which makes it much smaller than the average system. Nano-ITX, which was announced in March 2004, but is mainly used for industrial and business systems, is 12cm x 12cm. Pico-ITX has cut the size down once again, and measures in at an incredible 10cm x 7.2cm, but has retained almost all of the features and functionality of the larger platforms.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on one of the new motherboards, the EPIA PX10000. These are not yet available in the U.S., but I was able to purchase one from Mini-ITX.com, which is based in the U.K. The motherboards are not cheap, and they will seem quite barebones if you are used to working with ATX or Micro-ATX motherboards, but once you factor in the size and (relative) power they offer, Pico-ITX could be the perfect platform for a project PC or a silent computer.

Just to establish the basics, the PX10000G motherboard is powered by an embedded VIA C7 processor that runs at 1.0GHz and up to a gigabyte of RAM. The DDR2 400/533 fits into a single So-DIMM on the bottom of the motherboard. Storage is handled through a 44-pin right-angle IDE connector or a single SATA connection, though the motherboard has four USB slots which will come in handy as well. Graphics, one of the systems weakest points, is done by a VIA UniChrome Pro II 3D/2D AGP graphics with MPEG-2/4 and WMV9 video decoder and output to the on-board VGA connection or through LVDS to DVI.

A few things are apparent as soon as you look at the Pico-ITX motherboard and its specifications. The first is just how small it is–the 10mm x 7.2mm footprint makes for a board that is about the size of a 2.5″ hard drive, though somewhat thicker. Despite the size, the specifications make it clear that the ITX motherboard has a full range of connections, including DVI, VGA, ethernet, four USB ports, two PS/2 connections and more. This was originally accomplished with a daughterboard that increases the size of the motherboard substantially, but the newer revision of the PX10000 (the one we will be looking at) uses wired extensions instead. This means all the Pico-ITX motherboard itself needs for four USB ports is a 2×8 group of headers, which takes up almost no room on the motherboard and uses a few wires to push the connections a few inches away. This could be an issue down the road when it comes to designing ITX cases, but since no Pico-ITX cases have been developed yet (the only one we have seen is the VIA reference design which is not available for purchase or testing) is it not much of an issue.

The main features on the motherboard are a large aluminum heat sink, a fan to cool the heat sink and processor, VGA-out, an RJ-45 for Ethernet, a 44-pin IDE connection on the end, and a number of headers. The headers do everything else, including motherboard connections (power, reset, etc), DVI video, power, PS/2 for the keyboard and mouse, audio, and USB. Using all these at once can be a change, since the wires quickly become a mess, but once ITX cases are available, things should be much easier to work with. Storage will primarily be handled through the SATA port, as the IDE connection is 44-pin, not the more popular 40-pin. You will be able to find IDE-CF adapters that use a 44-pin design, but standard hard drives won’t work. Analog video can be done through the VGA connector on the side of the motherboard, but digital video will have to be routed through the LVDS connection and then through a wire to the DVI port.

Flipping the Pico-ITX motherboard over, we see it uses a very tall battery holder, which increases the height as much as the heat sink on the top and seems like a design flaw. For people trying to make their cases as small as possible, this will definitely be an obstacle, though the room is not totally wasted, because the memory is placed here as well. The PX10000 has a single slot for a DDR2 So-DIMM and a maximum memory size of 1 GB. Memory compatibility is an issue with the Pico-ITX motherboards, so it is important not to use high density sticks of DDR2, because the system may register only half of the correct size. From this angle, we can see the Pico motherboard has four mounting holes (one at each corner) so the design is stackable, which may be helpful for industrial applications or an involved home project.

Overall, the motherboard design may seem daunting, but it is not much more complex than a typical Mini-ITX motherboard. A lot of work is done through the headers, and the motherboard is quite fragile, but anyone who understands the basics of computer building will be able to tackle Pico-ITX. The challenge comes not from working with the motherboard, but finding the best way to put it in a case (hopefully this will not be a problem for long) and then getting an operating system installed and working properly.

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