Compact Intel-powered Mini ITX motherboard arrives with up to 128 GB RAM and four Ethernet ports

Aaeon has introduced a new Intel Panther Lake-powered mini ITX compact motherboard aimed primarily at the industrial and enterprise crowd.

Dubbed the MIX-PTLWV1, the Mini ITX motherboard comes equipped with the Intel Core Ultra 5 325 chip with up to a maximum of 128 GB DDR5-6400 RAM, courtesy of dual C/SO-DIMM slots.

The Core Ultra 5 325 Panther Lake CPU is a mid-range octa-core chip featuring four Cougar Cove performance cores and four Darkmont efficiency cores. In synthetic multi-threaded benchmarks, the Ultra5 325 APU should be a few percentage points faster than the Core Ultra 7 268V Lunar Lake CPU. 

This also puts the chip slightly ahead of the Apple M3 and roughly 7% ahead of the recently released AMD Ryzen AI 7 445 APU that is likely to be found in the next generation of compact and affordable mini PCs.

In simpler terms, the Core Ultra 5 Panther Lake CPU should be able to handle the majority of moderately intensive workloads without much of a hassle.

The 4-core Xe3 iGPU is no slouch either and can keep up with an AMD Radeon 860M iGPU, making it good enough for most non-intensive graphical workloads.

Perhaps more importantly, the MIX-PTLWV1 Mini ITX motherboard sports an impressive array of I/O options, which is to be expected from a product that is aimed at industrial usage. Exact details have been listed below:

• Dual 2.5 G Ethernet (+optional dual 10 G Ethernet)
• 4x USB 3.2 Gen 1
• 4x DisplayPort 1.4 ports
• Audio out (3.5 mm)
• 8-bit programmable DIO
• 40-pin LVDS, eDP 1.4
• 2x10-pin header for USB 3.2 Gen 1
• A single 4-pin header for audio I/O
• RS232/422/485 box headers and 5x RS232-only box headers

A single PCIe Gen 5 x8 slot is also present for expansion. An M.2 2230 E-key slot with PCIe 4.0 x1 interface is present, as is an M.2 3042/3052 B-Key with a nano SIM socket. Storage is handled by a single M.2 2280 slot with support for NVMe SSDs. 

Being targeted at industrial usage, the Panther Lake-equipped motherboard is far from inexpensive, coming in at around $951 for the Core Ultra 5 325-equipped variant with no RAM or storage. To know more about the MIX-PTLWV1 Mini ITX motherboard, potential customers can reach out to Aaeon directly.

All told, typical consumers looking for a decent mini ITX board with a powerful 8-core Ryzen 7 APU might want to check out the Minisforum BD775ISE, currently available for just $296 on Amazon.