J&W, the company that hides under the MINIX brand, has surprised us with one quite unique and feature packed ITX motherboard. J&W has announced the MINIX 890GX-USB3 board that supports all AMD socket AM3 CPUs including the 6-Core CPUs with 95W TDPs.
The board also features Broadcom Gigabit LAN and NEC based USB 3.0 support, as well as core unlocking for single, dual, quad and six-core CPUs, so you should be able to unlock some cores with this motherboard.
The chipset behind the board is AMD 890GX with an integrated graphics while the Southbridge or choice is SB850. The new Southbridge also brings the 6gbps SATA 3.0 support. This might be the world’s first ITX board to support 6Gbps RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 arrays.
The board also has a full 16X PCIe slot and the only downside is the support for 2x4GB SODIMM memory, that tends to be somewhat more expensive than normal DIMM. The board also has VGA, HDMI and VGA put and let's not forget the mini PCIe slot for add on cards such as Wi-Fi. The company considers to ship this board with a mini PCIe Wi-Fi card with antenna.
The target group for this product are the home theater enthusiasts and most of them wont mind the $180 end user price.
The board should be available shortly.