Zotac has announced that its two new mini-ITX Z68-based motherboards should be on sale in July this year.
The Z68-ITX WiFi and Z68-ITX WiFi Supreme are the first LGA1155 mini-ITX motherboards to be able to take advantage of Intel's K-series CPUs' unlocked multipliers, thanks to the Z68 chipset.
Previous mini-ITX LGA1155 motherboards have used either the H61 or H67 chipsets, neither of which support overclocking using the CPU multiplier.
The Z68-ITX WiFi sports dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, two SATA 6Gbps ports, dual HDMI ports and four USB 3 ports, along with Intel GMA HD 2000/3000 integrated graphics with the option for beefier gaming performance thanks to a 16x PCI-E slot.
Meanwhile, the Z68-ITX WiFi Supreme is geared more towards HTPCs with two SO-DIMM slots for dinky RAM modules, and there's also the option of an integrated DirectX11 GeForce GT 430 graphics chip. Both boards support RAID 0,1,0+1 and 5, as well as being compatible with LGA1155 Core i3, i5 and i7 CPUs.
Zotac has also hinted at the retail prices for the boards, with the Z68-ITX WiFi costing around $169.99 and the Z68-ITX WiFi Supreme demanding a little more at $219.99. UK reader's fear not, though - Zotac says that samples are already heading our way, so we'll be sure to give you low-down in the not too distant future.
While it remains to be seen how far you could push an Intel Core i5-2500K in a mini-ITX system, this is a major step forward for the small form factor, which has gained significant ground in recent years thanks to quad-core CPU support, beefier on-board graphics and the inclusion of 16x PCI-E graphics slots.
To see more of the motherboards head over to
Zotac's website.
Are you interested in Zotac's new motherboards? Will you be pairing one with an Intel K-series CPU? Let us know in the
forums.
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