Measuring just about 3.9″ x 2.8″, the new Gigabyte GA-PICO3350 motherboard is just a little larger than a Raspberry Pi Model B (3.4″ x 2.2″). But while the Raspberry Pi features an ARM-based processor and embedded memory, Gigabyte’s tiny board has a DDR3L SODIMM slot for laptop-type memory plus an mSATA/mini PCIe slot for storage.
That said, while you could theoretically use Gigabyte’s tiny new Pico ITX board for just about any computing task, its embedded 6 watt Intel Celeron N3350 dual-core “Apollo Lake” processor isn’t exactly a speed demon.
So I suspect this is the type of board that will appeal more to IoT developers than to home users. Still, it’s kind of nifty… mostly because it’s just so small.
In addition to the specs listed above, the board has the following features:
- 2 x USB 3.0
- Gigabit Ethernet
- HDMI 1.4a
- SATA 6Gb/s connector + SATA power connector
- USB 2.0, Serial port, GPIO, LVDS, and SMBus headers
Gigabyte says the system supports Windows 10 64-bit software as well as Linux (although the company suggests downloading “Linux driver from chipset vendors’ website or 3rd party website.”
There’s no word on the price for the GA-PICO3350, but the similarly-=sized MSI MS-98I6 sells for around $300 — although that model supports faster memory and features dual display outputs and dual Ethernet jacks, among other differences.
MSI’s pico-ITX board is also slightly larger, at 101mm x 73mm compared to 100mm x 72mm for the Gigabyte model.
via FanlessTech and Game It
I’m surprised to see SATA. It might be hard to find m.2 SATA drives 5 years from now. Everything is going m.2 NVME.
It isn’t M.2, it’s Msata, which is really outdated. There’s very poor selection above 256gb.
You are right about the mSATA port. Samasung makes 500GB and 1TB sticks at reasonable prices (for now).
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-500GB-mSATA-Internal-MZ-M6E500BW/dp/B07822P8JY/
It’s too bad that it only has a single lane of 6Gbps (8b/10b), compared to 4 lanes of 8Gbps (128b/130b) for NVME.
What a POS outdated SSD connector.
Hmm. Sure, it’s smaller. But at what cost? No cases available, slow and non-upgradable DDR3, ancient Msata slot. If it’s priced above $200, I’d rather buy a J5005 NUC. Sure it’s a bit bigger, but at least I get a case, and a CPU more than twice as powerful.
Yeah, this board stinks of eWaste.
Unless its for IoT, in which case, why not just get an Arduino or Raspberry Pi 4 instead?
Or better yet get an Udoo Bolt V8 (fastest) or the LattePanda Alpha (second fastest). They’re just as compact but way more capable. You can pay the Idiot Tax to get an Intel NUC (third fastest) if you’re interested in the logo/brand.
i’m guessing Intel is trying to keep themselves relevant… the way things are going it seems like there is going to be a shift to ARM processors. As of today I haven’t used a computer with an x86 processor in months.
My RPi4 and Odroid C2 are nowhere as nice as my i3 NUC running a linux desktop. There is a lot of commercial software that I need to run on x86 linux (Vivado, Eagle, Mplab, Steam, GreenPAK…), none of which I paid a dime for. Yep, ARM is getting better everyday, but x86 is a very well polished, well supported beast.