Gigabyte and Biostar make motherboards with passively cooled Bay Trail CPUs

The manufacturers Gigabyte and Biostar have released their first motherboards in the US that have integrated Intel Celeron J1800 processors from the Bay Trail-D series. In both cases, these are dual-core processors that run at 2.41GHz and are passively cooled.

Both motherboards have a mini-itx format that, combined with the passive cooling of the processors, should make them suitable for an htpc or a simple, economical desktop. The only significant difference between the two motherboards is that the Gigabyte variant with two DDR3 memory slots supports 16GB of memory while the Biostar motherboard with one slot offers up to 8GB.

Despite their small size, both motherboards are equipped with all standard features, such as a PCI Express x1 slot, support for USB 3.0, on-board sound, an Ethernet connection and an HDMI output. It is striking that there are no SATA3 but SATA2 connections on the boards. An SSD that is connected to these motherboards will probably not perform optimally.

The motherboards will cost relatively little. The American web store Directron has the Biostar variant on sale for $ 59.99, discovered technology site FanlessTech. It is not yet known how much the motherboards will cost in euros and when they will come here.