MSI launches three mini-itx motherboards with Braswell chips

MSI has released three new small and economical motherboards with soldered Celeron and Pentium chips. The company’s new ECO models are intended, among other things, for htpc applications.

The new motherboards have been given the names N3050I ECO, N3150I ECO and N3700I ECO from MSI. As the names indicate, the mini-itx boards are successively equipped with the Celeron N3050 dualcore, the Celeron N3150 quadcore and the Pentium N3700 quadcore, which are soldered to a BGA socket. These are recently released 14nm chips with Airmont cores, which Intel also uses for Cherry Trail Atoms. The chips are passively cooled on the ECO plates.

The socs contain graphics chips from Intel’s eighth generation and which support hardware processing of h.265 content and the display of uhd material, which can be output via the hdmi 1.4b connection on the motherboards. The motherboards have two SO-DIMM slots for up to 8GB DDR3L-1600 RAM. There are also two SATA600 ports, a PCIe 2.0 x1 slot, Gigabit Ethernet and USB 3.0.

More details about the motherboards, such as prices and release dates, are not yet known.