ASRock Z68-ITX Motherboard for Compact HTPCs

ASRock launched its Z68M-ITX/HT motherboard which should prove to be one of the more wallet friendly mini-ITX Z68 boards out there. That said, it's hardly a crowded market space at the moment with Zotac having the only other two models currently available.

As this is a mini-ITX board, the Z68M-ITX/HT is fairly feature light with only a single x16 PCI Express slot and four SATA ports, as well as a pair of headers for two USB 2.0 ports. The real action happens around the back where we have a PS/2 port, four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, an eSATA port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out and a DVI, D-Sub and HDMI port.

ASRock also supplies an infrared dongle and a Windows MCE compatible remote with the board which is a nice added extra considering that a fair few of these boards are likely to end up in HTPC type systems. You also get a copy of Lucid Logix Virtu graphics switching software in the box. No word on pricing as yet, but considering that ASRock's H67 version of this board is one of the more affordable H67 mini-ITX boards, we'd expect the Z68M-ITX/HT to end up being only slightly more expensive.