The other day I wrote about MeLE PCG35 Apo mini PC which comes with soldered RAM and eMMC flash, and one person commented about having a model with more than 4GB RAM, but I explained it would not be cost-effective to add more RAM for low cost Windows 10 mini PCs since they would not qualify for Microsoft discount, and it would significantly add to the price. So Microsoft has a big impact on this market segment, and even if you’re going to run Ubuntu or other Linux distributions, those requirements indirectly affect your choice of hardware. One solution is to buy barebone mini PC, or at least with upgradeable RAM and storage, but there aren’t that many with an Apollo Lake processor. Intel NUC6CAYS NUC or GIGABYTE GB-BPCE-3350 are options, and on the Chinese side, you could consider Voyo V1 VMac Mini. AFAIK, none of those options are fanless, but GIGABYTE GA-SBCAP3350 single board computer offers a SO-DIMM RAM slot, two SATA ports, as well as a mSATA socket, and appears to have been designed for passively cooled system with a large integrated SoC heat spreader.
GIGABYTE GA-SBCAP3350 SBC specifications:
- SoC – Intel Celeron N3350 dual core processor @ 1.1 GHz / 2.4 GHz with 12 EU Intel HD graphics 500 @ 200 MHz / 650 MHz (6W TDP)
- System Memory – 1x SO-DIMM socket for up to 8GB DDR3L 1333/1600/1866 MHz
- Storage – 2x SATA 6Gb/s connectors, 1x MSATA connector (MSATA_MPCIE2), 2x 64Mbit flash for AMI UEFI BIOS supporting PnP 1.0a, DMI 2.7, WfM 2.0, SM BIOS 2.7, ACPI 5.0
- Video Output – 1x HDMI 1.4 ports up to 4K @ 30 Hz, 1x VGA up to 1920×1200 @ 60 Hz, 1x LVDS header, 1x flat panel header, 1x backlight switch header
- Audio – HDMI out, headphone jack, 1x speaker header, 1x volume control header; Realtek ALC255 2-channel audio codec
- Connectivity – 2x Gigabit Ethernet (Realtek chip)
- USB – 2x USB 3.1 Gen 1 type A ports, 4x USB 2.0/1.1 via internal headers
- Other Expansion
- 1x half size Mini PCIe slot (MPCIE1) conforming to PCI Express 2.0 standard
- 4x serial port headers + 4x serial port power select jumpers
- 1x LPT/GPIO header and 1x LPT configuration header
- 1x I2C, 1x SMBUS
- Misc – 1x system fan, 1x front panel header, 1x battery cable header, 1x buzzer header, 1x BIOS select jumper, 1x clear CMOS jumper, 1x chassis intrusion header, H/W monitoring for voltage, temperature, fan speed control & detection, etc…
- Power Supply – DC in connector
- Dimensions – 14.6 x 10.2 cm
The board is said to support Windows 10 64-bit, and older Windows version may not be supported. Linux should be supported too, but the company asks to download Linux driver from chipset vendors or third party websites. So you’d be on your own…
The dimensions (14.6 x 10.2 cm) are the ones of 3.5″ embedded SBCs, so it should be possible to find an enclosure. The form factor and features could however mean it’s not for consumer market, but the enterprise / embedded market only.
Price and availability information has not been disclosed. You may find more details on the product page.
Via FanlessTech
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Interesting if Gigabyte opens this for the consumer market. Open questions:
– which RTL8211 revision (I hope for G or H)?
– can the MSATA_MPCIE2 slot configured to be mPCIe instead?
– ‘2 x SATA power connectors’ are mentioned. Do they provide 12V too for 3.5″ disks when DC-IN voltage is above 12V (‘Wide Range 9~36V DC-In’)?
Ahhhh! A moderately powerful fanless board, at last! A few years ago I’d have said “pwa, it uses a realtek ethernet chips, no way”, nowadays it’s more “look, it has real networking and it’s gigabit, and there are two ports!”.
Heatspreaders on the bottom make excellent development boards to place on the desk. They spread the heat well and are correctly isolated against touching whetever screw or other thing lying on the desk.
This is Gigabyte we talking here, guys. And Gigabyte is synonym with ‘expensive’ 🙂
How’s it possible that a x86 PC system doesn’t use the 24-pin ATX connector or the 4 to 8 pin extra 12V for CPU?
Normally. This is all about power requirements.
There are tens or even hundreds of SBC boards using just a jack connector. On my desk I have some PC Engines Alix, Axiomtek NANO831, Commell LP-170 and LE-376, there are similar solutions at Jetway, all of them are powered from either 12V or a wide voltage range using a small jack.
There are also all those laptops which have been working the same for decades.
@nobe
Some Mainboard vendors like ASRock even encourage to use those 19V laptop PSUs for their energy efficient mainboard variants since oversized ATX PSUs horribly increase overall consumption compared to a proper dimensioned DC-IN source. See eg. http://www.asrock.com/mb/intel/q1900dc-itx/
Any word on pricing?
Thank you so much for pointing out this SBC. Just what I needed. :=)
Two months later, still can’t find anywhere listing this for sale. Vaporware?