Who remembers putting together their own rig for thousands of dollars back in the 90’s? Well, times have certainly changed, because building a PC these days obviously doesn’t involve a second mortgage or divorce papers.
That’s right, MSI’s offering a new main board + CPU (integrated Intel Bay Trail Celeron processor) for a cool $60 – just perfect for an HTPC or budget-minded desktop.
According to Liliputing, the j1800i is quite similar to the ECS BAT-I, as it features a 64-bit dual-core chip clocked at 2.41Ghz, with only a small aluminum heat-sink required for cooling.
“With a TDP of just 10W, the Celeron J1800 isn’t going to throw a whole lot of heat,” a Liliputing writer explained. “Flanking the CPU on MSI’s new mini board are dual DIMM slots that can accommodate a maximum of 8GB of DDR3 RAM.”
Storage involves two SATA ports (sans an mSATA socket), with the following display options: VGA, DVI and HDMI. Additional ports include legacy PS/2 keyboard/mouse, two USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports and a gigabit Ethernet port.
As Liliputing points out, the MSI j1800i is priced very reasonably at $60, even after adding in a case and power supply for $110 (total). Add $75 for additional RAM and a drive for a grand total of $250.
It should also be noted that MSI is planning to offer an upgraded version of the board equipped with a quad-core Intel 1850 Celeron.
