Zotac IONITX-P-E Mini-ITX Motherboard Review

Overview
Let’s take a better look at the motherboard itself.  In the first picture listed below you will see the whole motherboard.  Pretty tiny isn’t it? Measuring at almost 7″x7″ keeps it at the level of a Mini-ITX motherboard. It’s crazy that they can jam that much into such a compact area. In the second picture you can see the heat sink which is mounted and really shouldn’t  be removed. Underneath the heat sink is the Intel SU2300U processor which powers the Zotac board.

Zotac IONITX-P-E Mini-ITX Motherboard Zotac IONITX-P-E Mini-ITX Motherboard

Moving on to the features of this  board, right above the PCI express slot you will see the wireless card. With this model they have only one of the antennas being used, but you can always buy another kit from Zotac and then have two wireless antennas. Also in the same area you have the three SATA ports and the CMOS battery.  Underneath that you will have the full speed  PCI express 16x slot for graphics cards or other PCI express cards if you want to add more to the system later down the road.

Zotac IONITX-P-E Mini-ITX Motherboard Zotac IONITX-P-E Mini-ITX Motherboard

Here we have the 20pin ATX  power connector area right beside the two DDR3 Slots. On the back of the motherboard you have a lot jammed into a small space. Starting at the left and going right you have the  old PS2 port for a keyboard or mouse and two USBs. Then there is the HDMI and Digital and Optical out, VGA and DVI Video ports, four more USB 2.0 ports and a eSATA.  In addition you’ll see the Gigabit network port, and your audio ports.  The last feature on the board is where you would screw in the wireless antenna.

Zotac IONITX-P-E Mini-ITX Motherboard Zotac IONITX-P-E Mini-ITX Motherboard

Installation
Lian Li PC-Q08 Mini-ITX case
2x 500GB Western Digital Green hard drive
4 Gigs DDR3 1066Mhz
Asus Dvd burner
Inland 400w Power Supply

With this computer case it’s both easy and difficult at the same time, but then building a computer is never really easy, right?  Well let’s get into the fun stuff.  I had to take off the side panel to get to the motherboard mounting area.   Then I mounted the Motherboard.  Pretty simple and straight forward, considering it only uses 4 screws to mount to the side panel.

Zotac IONITX-P-E Mini-ITX Motherboard

The next step was to get the side panel back onto the case with the 6 screws. After this was completed I started to run all my cables to the motherboard.

Zotac IONITX-P-E Mini-ITX Motherboard Zotac IONITX-P-E Mini-ITX Motherboard

Moving on, I installed the power supply and ran all those cables. Then I made sure I screwed in the wireless antenna.  Now that we have everything installed, let’s go fire it up.

Zotac IONITX-P-E Mini-ITX Motherboard Zotac IONITX-P-E Mini-ITX Motherboard