These Mini-ITX boards route PCIe lanes through MCIO connectors
The company has presented two boards: MS-Challenger MCIO ITX and MS-PC Farm B860I. Both are based on Intel 800-series platforms and use MCIO connectors for PCIe expansion. MCIO stands for Mini Cool Edge I/O and is defined under the SFF-TA-1016 specification . It can carry PCIe Gen5 links and is also designed for future PCIe Gen6 use.
No standard PCIe x16 slot on MS-Challenger MCIO ITX
The MS-Challenger MCIO ITX appears to be based on the same PCB layout as the MS-Challenger H810ITX WIFI, but the standard PCIe slot has been removed. Maxsun replaced it with two MCIO connectors.
The board is planned with Q870, Z890, H810 and B860 chipset options. The Q870 and Z890 versions support PCIe lane splitting in x8+x8 or x8+(x4+x4) mode. The H810 and B860 versions use a combined x16 mode across two MCIO interfaces.
The second board is the MS-PC Farm B860I, which was already shown by Maxsun last year as a Mini-ITX design with four DDR5 UDIMM slots. This model is aimed at PC cluster deployments, so the CPU socket and memory slots use a rotated layout for denser systems.
Source: MaxSun
Maxsun now says the MS-PC Farm B860I uses a native MCIO design. Unlike the MS-Challenger board, this model still has one PCIe expansion slot alongside two MCIO connectors. It also supports IPMI management, forced BIOS flashing and intelligent fault diagnosis.
The design is less useful for normal gaming PCs, because most desktop graphics cards still expect a standard PCIe x16 slot. For server-style racks, external GPU links, riser cables or dense PC farm systems, MCIO gives board makers more freedom with cable routing and lane allocation.
Source: MaxSun
