VIA Technologies announced theif VIA EPIA M700 Mini-ITX board, the first to feature the VIA VX800 chipset, for digital signage and retail display systems.

Available in two versions, the VIA EPIA M700 uses either a 1.5GHz or fanless 1.0GHz VIA C7 processor, depending on system performance, size and thermal requirements, and supports up to 2GB of DDR2 system memory. The VIA EPIA M700 leverages the multimedia performance of the VIA VX800 unified chipset with its VIA Chrome9 HC3 integrated DirectX 9.0 graphics core and up to six-channel VIA Vinyl HD Audio surround sound, while the VIA Chromotion video engine provides hardware video acceleration for MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV9, VC1 and DivX video, plus a VMR capable HD video processor.

The VIA EPIA M700 boasts two PCI-Express based Gigabit LAN ports to facilitate wideband data transfer for large video and other files over networks.

As well as a front panel DVI port, pin headers for an additional DVI or HDMI port through a daughterboard are also included, as is support for 18-bit TTL displays. Digital video input is available through pin headers supporting CCIR