We managed to get hold of a close-up of an Atom motherboard and we can tell that this tiny desktop creature is minuscule but powerful.

This particular board we snapped is a Nettop board with an integrated CPU in a 17cm x 17cm mini ITX form factor.

So, let’s start with an obvious thing, the board supports two SATA drives and two PATA devices and it has a 24-pin ATX power connector. It also accommodates two DDR2 memory modules. There is also a single PCI slot on the board if you need it and you can see that some legacy stuff such as two PS2 connectors for your old keyboard and mouse are still there.

This particular model has eSata support, optical SPDIF, 5.1-channel audio, VGA and DVI, four USB ports and an Ethernet port. Depending on the design, motherboard vendors will support 100Mbit LAN, while some will choose to implement 1000Mbit LAN.

Well, after all, here is the picture of the board + CPU, of a Nettop platform without any heatsinks.