VIA will this month ship its EPIA EK Mini-ITX mobo, pitching the product at enthusiasts, system builders and OEMs keen to construct near-silent x86-compatible machines. The motherboard provides six-channel audio, plus MPEG 2 and 4 decoding hardware, and yet consumes no more than 19W of power, the company claimed.

The EPIA EK is based on VIA's Luke CoreFusion platform, and will ship in two versions, respectively with an 800MHz and a 1GHz CPU on board. There's a single 400MHz DDR SDRAM memory slot capable of taking up to 1GB of RAM. The graphics and video decoding are driven by an integrated UniChrome Pro AGP engine.

The mainboard features twin 10/100Mbps Ethernet ports driven by separate controllers, though a Gigabit Ethernet port is available as an optional extra in place of one of the 10/100Mbps ports. There's a PCI slot for expansion, legacy parallel, serial and PS2 ports, VGA, four USB 2.0 connectors - with a second pin-out on the board to add four more - and a wide range of other media and display connectors.

The 17 x 17cm, six-layer, RoHS-compliant board is due to ship later this month, VIA said. ®