Closer looks
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Zotac has kept the accessories plain and simple. Along with the motherboard provided are only the necessities. A couple manuals, driver-cd, wlan card, I/O shield, couple sata-cables and sata-power adapter are the only ones you’re going to get with the product. However that’s the same accessories you’re going to get with most motherboards on the market nowdays.
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The layout of the motherboard is fairly good. Three sata connectors are between MCP heatsink and the PCI-E connector. There are two DDR2 memory slots and a 24pin ATX-connector. 9300-ITX WIFI also requires the 4pin +12V connector. Something which suprised me in the positive way is the PCI-E connector. Most mini-itx motherboards have only PCI or PCI-E 4x connector, but Zotac has decided to put a full 16x PCI-E connector. That allows you, at least theoretically, to put even the highest end gaming cards to this little motherboard. Theoretically because in most cases you don’t have a power supply to meet the requirements of a high end graphics card in your mini-itx case. There’s pinheaders for 6 USB connectors, frontal audio, COM-port and SPDIF provided in the motherboard.
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9300-ITX WIFI has a four phase power for the CPU socket. As this is no way is an overclocking motherboard, don’t expect any high range voltage adjustments and overclockings. The capasitors are solid aluminium capped and they shouldn’t leak as easy as the normal capacitors used in the past. Also worth mentioning is the capability of dual channel memory sets. Most ITX-motherboards up today don’t support dual-channel memories, but 9300-ITX WIFI does. That’s something worth keeping in mind when deciding which motherboard to buy for your HTPC. Unfortunately the front panel connectors are poorly marked and you have to check in manual which pin is the positive and which is the negative.
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Let’s take a look at the I/O panel. The I/O panel looks fairly familiar with what we’ve used to see in most micro-atx motherboards. Alongside with the sound and ethernet connectors there’s six USB 2.0 connectors, eSATA connector, two digital audio connectors (SPDIF and RCA) and three display connectors (VGA, DVI, HDMI). The 9300 chipset supports two digital video outputs so you can use DVI + HDMI to make a dualscreen system with both in digital outputs. There’s also one PS/s port for keyboard.
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