Expreview has uncovered Zotac's latest mini-ITX board and this time it's based on the Nvidia ION platform. This is the second ION product to make an appearance so far and Zotac's board even one-ups the Acer Aspire Revo, as it will be available with the dual core Atom 330 processor.

Zotac will also offer a model with the single core Atom 230 processor for a lower price. The model names should be IONITX-A-U (Atom 330) and IONITX-B-E (Atom 230) and it looks as if both boards will be passively cooled by a huge heatsink.

Feature wise these boards should appeal to a wide range of users, least not HTPC fans, as you're looking at just about every connectivity option you could possibly want, bar one thing, the boards has no PCI Express or PCI slots. On the other hand, there is a mini card slot (mini PCI Express) on the board, but at least on the picture, this is populated by a WiFi card, but we're not sure if this will come fitted as standard or not. It's also unknown if this slot supports PCI Express devices or only USB devices, as the mini card slots can support both or just one or the other.

Around the back of the board you'll find a PS/2 port, six USB 2.0 ports, an eSATA connector, HDMI, DVI, D-sub, Gigabit Ethernet, three analog audio jacks and optical as well as coaxial S/PDIF out. You also get two memory slots for DDR2 800MHz memory, three SATA connectors with support for RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 and a couple of additional headers for extra USB 2.0 ports. The GPU is said to be clocked at 450MHz with its Shaders running at 1,100MHz. We'd still take the specifications with a pinch of salt, but the IONITX-A-U might even feature an onboard DC-DC converter.

The fact that the IONITX-A-U would come with a DC-DC converter explains the massive price difference between the boards, as the IONITX-A-U is said to be hitting retail in Japan for a whopping $305 (€234/£211), while the IONITX-B-E will be a somewhat more affordable $204 (€158/£141). We'd expect the prices to be somewhat lower elsewhere, as prices are usually quite high on things like this in Japan.

You can find some more details and a low-resolution picture of the board here