The popular VIA EPIA motherboards, used in many projects requiring low power PCS, are getting a healthy dose of technical refresh. The latest EPIA motherboards will incorporate many new hardware features, including a very important one: PCIe x16 support. While they still have the onboard Chrome IGP, the new boards will have a single PCI-Ex slot, making them much more flexible for instances such as using them as media centers where beefier GPUs are needed. The newer boards will also feature four SATA-II connectors and accept DDR-2 memory.
Along with their C7 CPUs, these boards seem destined for things like home-brew NAS or media centers. The boards do not have an official release date, though VIA is expected to begin sampling them in July.