ASUS Quietly Launched Cherry Trail SoC MATX Motherboards

Just because a processor is designed with one field in mind, doesn’t mean you can’t take it for something else. A previous prime example of this was the AMD Neo II, but this time ASUS have taken the 14nm Cherry Trail platform designed for tablets and packed it onto two new motherboards.

The two new motherboards silently launched by ASUS are the N3050M-E and N3150M-E and the only difference between the two is what SoC they’re using.

The motherboard numbering follows the CPU and the boards come with either the Intel Celeron Dual-Core N3050 SoC or Quad-Core N3150 SoC onboard Processors that have a TDP of 4W and 6W respectively. This allows for a passive and completely silent cooling while the mATX form factor still allows for plenty of customization.

You get one PCIe 2.0 x16 slot that runs in x1 mode and two normal PCIe 2.0 x1 slots and two U-DIMM RAM sockets for a maximum of 8GB DDR3 1600MHz Non-ECC dual-channel memory.

The motherboards have two onboard SATA3 ports that support Intel’s Smart Connect Technology, Realtek TRL8111H1 Gigabit Ethernet, Realtek ALC887-VD2 8-channel HD Audio and both USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports with UASP support and onboard headers for both.

The boards should also last quite well with five times protection, over 1000 devices tested for compatibility, and with over 7000 validation hours. The five protections include LANGuard that protects your network connection, enhanced DRAM overcurrent protection, 5K-hr solid-state capacitors, stainless-steel back I/O and ESD Guards for protection against electrostatic discharge.

There is a lot of potential in these small SoC’s, they even support native 4K UHD resolutions and come with UEFI BIOS for easy configuration.