Gigabyte intros Churchill mini DTX motherboard
By Darren Murph 
posted May 16th 2007 12:37AM
posted May 16th 2007 12:37AM
As this year rolled in, AMD introduced a DTX open standard in hopes of boosting the allure of SFF adoption, and sure enough, Gigabyte took the bait. The firm's first mini DTX motherboard, dubbed Churchill, reportedly "serves as a base for AMD's Live! Home Media Server platform," and supports the Socket AM2 Athlon 64 and Sempron single- / dual-core processors. The mobo also features a SiS761GX north and SiS966 south bridge, an integrated Mirage 1 graphics core, a single PCIe slot, one vanilla PCI slot, six SATA ports, a total of eight USB 2.0 connectors scattered about, an built-in audio to boot. No word on pricing just yet, but the wee board should slip in under your nose sometime in July.
Umm, DTX is small and ATX isn't exactly small. DTX supposedly is open, and has very minimal specs allowing vendors and OEMs freedom to implement it as they best see fit. I haven't actually read the license agreement, or the specs... just going off the intro press releases, and other commentators.
One of those Sata's must be an Esata port on the back unless I somehow lost the ability to count higher then 5.
I like the specs, but I've never had much love for SiS chipsets. Something about them has always screamed CHEAP!!
Looks like a regular pci slot to me, not pcie
the PCIe slot is to the left of the PCI slot. It is only 1x (small) and black. easier to see in the picture from the linked article
http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/4746_large_GA-2761GXDK_PIC.jpg
pcie is the little fella to the left of it
thanks for the link to the larger picture.
in reply to JohnnyCashAK, there is indeed an e-sata port, you can see it in the linked picture, on the top left corner, next to where it says "PCB MADE IN CHINA", there's a orange-tinged port labelled E_SATA.
sweet
I can almost see one of these boards as a base for car pc. As long as the board will support the mobile CPUs that is.
Problems with this: Only two RAM slots means you have to go one class higher when buying RAM (buying 2 1GB sticks versus 4 0.5 GB sticks). Can't get dual channel on odd-number RAM amounts (3 GB, 5 GB) (I believe this is true).
Obviously with this one, the lack of a PCIex16 is a minus. But I'm sure one will be added. But jamming it too close to the neighboring PCI slot could render your PCI slot useless if your graphics card is fat.
mATX usually offers 4 DIMM slots and 2/3 PCI + PCIex16 and maybe a PCIex1 slot. It's not as small but still much friendlier.
So many nubs with so many uninformed opinions. This is intended for use in small form factor computers not a full desktop system. These will find their way into bank machines and the like. I myself don't like SIS but for say a carputer it would make a welcome update to my Via Eden. A core duo would rock house compared to the weak Via cpu.