ZOTAC D2700-ITX WiFi Supreme Review

👤by Tony Le Bourne Comments 📅16-05-12
Closer Look

Reverse side of the motherboard

Turning the Zo/preme over we see some low profile capacitors and the RTL8110SC lan controller, it is always a treat to flip an itx motherboard over as you never know what they may mount on this side. In this situation there were no major surprises.


Top edge of the D2700-ITX WiFi Supreme

First we see the bare heatsink and its 40 fins and dual 6mm heatpipes. I had hoped to remove the heatsink to take a look at the Atom and GPU core and anything else lurking beneath, however, the heatsink was firmly attached and despite my attempts I feared that if the heatsink did come off, the forces involved would have caused the dainty ITX motherboard to fly out the window and embed itself into the neighbours cat. So I let it be for fear of risking any damage.
The top edge appears pretty empty with just the 4pin ATX power supply connector standing out amongst a few capacitors and chokes and the 4pin PWM CPU fan header.


Two SODIMM DDR3 slots

The right side edge affords us with the 24pin ATX power supply connector followed by another 4pin fan header. We get to see the two SODIMM DDR3 1066MHz slots. The Atom only has a single channel IMC and allows for a max memory capacity of a meagre 4GB, the choice to use 2x SODIMM slots seems to be more of one out of balance rather than necessity.


Bottom right corner

In this sector we have a few nice surprises, firstly we have an onboard power and reset button, always handy for testing. We also see the front panel connection headers, clear CMOS jumper, as well as a neat little mPCIe/mSATA port including standoffs for attaching a mSATA solid state drive. This addition is an interesting one, in the manual though it states
'You can only use either mSATA or SATA2 device at a time. The default working mode is SATA2. The SATA2 will become unavailable when mSATA SSD is installed.
This is likely a limitation of the Atom CPU, though the option to add a SSD with little space implication is still a worthy consideration.


Bottom left section

The bottom left corner is jam packed with components and features, here we see the Realtek ALC892 audio codec adjacent to the PCIe x16 lane, above the audio chip you will find the front panel audio header tucked away behind the SPDIF out header. The tell tale yellow base of the COM headers is to the left of the BIOS chip which is then followed by the CMOS battery. To the right of the CMOS battery we see the two vibrant red SATA 3Gb/s ports and the USB 2.0 header. If this area wasn't packed with all the nutrition an ITX motherboard would need, we also have the mPCIe WiFi combo card delivering the wireless N and Bluetooth connectivity. It is in this small section of PCB that really makes you realise why you pay a premium for ITX motherboards.


Rear I/O ports

A comprehensive selection of USB, video and audio outputs. In order from left to right we have, PS/2 Keyboard, 2x USB 2.0, Displayport, HDMI 1.4a, 2x aerial connections, DVI, 2x USB 3.0, gigabit lan, 2x USB 2.0, 7.1 audio and mic jacks and finally an optical S/PDIF out.


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