ECS (Elitegroup Computer Systems) seems to has played with Atom design quite a bit recently as at its Computex booth people can see the 945GCD-M, a motherboard packed with an Atom CPU that includes a PCI-Express x16 slot to enable the use of a discrete graphics card.

Seen below, the 945GCD-M features the 1.6GHz Atom 230 CPU and 945GC chipset and provides two DDR2-533 memory slots supporting up to 2GB of RAM, the PCIe x16 and an x1 slot, an IDE connector and three SATA 3.0 Gbps ports, plus Ethernet and 5.1 channel audio. Since the chipset has an integrated graphics core the motherboard has an D-Sub output but most will probably like to take advantage of the PCIe slot and install a graphics card to get more FPS in games and maybe even some accelerated HD playback.




Photo courtesy of Hexus.