Physical Overview

One look at the P4-ITX and you'll see how small everything is. Here's a shot of the motherboard with the processor installed.

The P4-ITX is based on the VIA Mini-ITX form factor standard. If you're curious to see just how small this board really is - we'll compare the P4-ITX to the recently reviewed Intel D845GERG2 MicroATX motherboard. Here's a snapshot of the comparison (the Intel MicroATX board is on the left and the P4-ITX is on the right):

Now that's a sizable difference!

We'll start our overview with the I/O ports on the rear of the motherboard.

Like other EPIA motherboards, the P4-ITX has plenty of I/O options for you to use. There are:

• 1 PS/2 keyboard and 1 PS/2 mouse port
• 1 VGA connector
• 2 USB 2.0 ports
• 1 10/100 Base-T Ethernet port
• 1 S-Video port
• 1 RCA Port which can be used either as SPDIF-out or TV Out
• 6 Channel Audio out

Right next to the I/O ports is the Pentium 4 socket where you'll also find the heatsink retention system. Notice how close the capacitors are to the retention system? Despite the closeness, we had no problems installing the stock Intel heatsink/fan unit.

We hope you have no plans on installing a floppy disk drive since the FDD interface is in a terrible location between the I/O ports and the Pentium 4 socket. If you do need the drive, then you're going to need to do some serious cable routing.

To the right of the Pentium 4 socket, you'll find the heatsinks for the PCI chipset. Notice that there are no fans on the heatsinks which helps to reduce ambient system noise. The system battery is placed upright along the side of one of the heatsinks.

To the right of the chipset is the lone PCI slot. There are no AGP slots so don't plan on purchasing an AGP card for this board. If you intend on using this motherboard as the basis for a home theater personal computer, then you may want to consider purchasing an ATI All-In-Wonder PCI card or a TV Tuner card. The on board integrated graphics performance is far from stellar as we will see in a bit.

The top row of the motherboard has the IDE connectors and the ATX power connector.

The 12V power connector is actually back towards the rear I/O ports.

Along the top edge of the motherboard is a single DDR memory slot which limits you to a maximum of 1GB of DDR memory.

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