The NEX-971 is an ATX motherboard. It accepts a Socket LGA1151 Intel® Core™ i9/i7/i5/i3, Pentium® or Celeron® processor and supports four 288-pin 2666MHz dual-channel DDR4 DIMM modules up to 64 GB. The integrated Intel® Q370 chipset supports six SATA 6Gb/s drives. Moreover, the NEX-971 includes DP++, HDMI and VGA interfaces for triple independent display.

The NEX-971 provides two GbE interfaces through the Intel® I219LM (with Intel® AMT 11.0 support) and the Intel® I211AT PCIe controllers. Expansion and I/O include two PCI slots, two PCIe x8 slots, three PCIe x4 slots, two M.2 slots, two USB 3.2 Gen 1, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 and two USB 2.0 on the rear panel, four USB 2.0 via internal pin headers, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 via internal box header and six COM ports.