Atom-Based Mini-ITX Motherboard Available

LWATCDR writes "A company out of the UK is selling an Intel Atom-based Mini-ITX motherboard. It has a riser for two PCI cards, two SATA ports, and an IDE ports so it could make a great little NAS, firewall, MAME box, or low-power workstation. To add to the fun it has a real parallel port 'perfect for hardware hacking,' a real RS-232 port 'perfect for data acquisition,' and two USB ports. The price is around $100, give or take, and hopefully it will come down over time. All in all a nice system to run Linux, WindowsXP, BSD, or maybe even OpenSolaris on."

Comments

Atom-based? That's small!

[YouWantFriesWithThat]

I could sniff a line of them and have a LAN in my sinus cavity!

Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand what makes this online store special; several other sites are taking preorders for the same exact Intel board (the site listed isn't shipping the boards until June)...

nas not really

[stokessd]

I thought it would make a great mini NAS nut it only has a 10/100 nic. That was a bummer

Sheldon

Re:nas not really

[schnikies79]

If you don't need the PCI slot for anything else you can put in a gigabit card.

Re:nas not really

[Joe The Dragon]

the pci bus can hit the full gig-e speeds.

Re:nas not really

[msim]

I bought one of the Via C7 1GHz boards to run as a ultra low powered NAS server the other day, it ended up costing me $50AU posted (which is like $53US at the moment). As much as i'd love to keep getting the latest and greatest like this thing (which looks pretty damned nice). I guess i had to commit and buy something at some point, and at the price i paid, i got it dirt cheap.

On the downside the board i got didn't have onboard SATA (which i knew when i bought it, but for $50 i could live with that compromise). I guess i'll have to put a SATA controller card in the pci slot.

I still haven't figured out what to run on it, i was leaning towards FreeNAS, but i'll give a few things a shot before i settle for something.

Oh and regarding 10/100 vs Gig-e? my switch doesn't do Gig-e so that was never a real concern for me.

[/random gabbling]

Re:nas not really

[compro01]

just barely. PCI gives 133MBps (1.06Gbps) maximum.

Re:nas not really

[enoz]

I have used a gigabit ethernet PCI interface and the throughput never went higher than 20MB/s.

YMMV

Re:nas not really

[Bl4ckJ3sus]

I highly recommend FreeNAS. I run mine on a 600mhz celeron w/ gig-e and a couple of old IDE drives. It has performed flawlessly for over a year. Boot from CDROM, save settings to USB...done.

Re:nas not really

[Anonymous Coward]

Large B, or small b?

Bytes or bits, in other words.

It's a general rule of thumb you won't get more than 30-40Mbs on a 100Mbs connection.

20MBs on a 1000Mbs connection isn't /great/ but it's still better than a normal 100Mbs connection.

Re:nas not really

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I was bummed it was a realtek NIC, and not an Intel gige :)

Re:nas not really

[enoz]

Sorry, to clarify that is 20MiB/s (megabytes per second). I think that was measuring the total packet and not just the data portion.

What's that general rule of thumb based on? On 100mbps ethernet I can easily sustain >9MiB/s (~70mbps).

Re:nas not really

[WaroDaBeast]

The GP post is right about the usual transfer. However what he forgot to mention is that the bandwidth is shared with all the PCI devices, which is very likely to be the reason why your ethernet card peaks at 20 MB/s. As for the atom ITX motherboard, a Gb NIC could reach, or at least get close to the maximum transfer rate in my opinion, since there is only one PCI slot. The Realtek sound chip is probably a planar device (cabled in PCI), but I do not think it'll eat away that much bandwidth, especially if you restrain its use to 16 bit, 48 KHz sound quality.

Re:nas not really

[dreamchaser]

I would question why someone would even leave the sound enabled at all if they are using one of these as a server. If one is concerned at all about sharing the PCI bus then just disable everything you don't need, and sound on a NAS box is certainly under the 'don't need' category.

Re:nas not really

[Anonymous Coward]

Standard 32-bit PCI might be 133MB/s shared, but even if you're not using any other PCI devices you're not going to get gigabit throughput out of it.

If you use a tool like NTTcp to test Ethernet throughput, you generally see ~935Mbit from PCIe based Gigabit chipsets -- very close to the theoretical maximum.

Throughput typically drops to ~735Mbit with standard PCI-based chipsets. Still a lot better than 100Mbit, but it's worth pointing out.

Just because PCI can runs at gigabit speeds doesn't mean your gigabit card sitting on that bus is going to reach such heights.

Re:nas not really

[fitten]

That depends highly on what you are doing. Even "back in the day" (over 10 years ago) we saw sustained 9MiB to 10MiB sustained transfers for very large transfers (multiple GiB data transfer) using standard BSD sockets programmatically. If you use some other protocols on top of TCP/IP that's more chatty, you'll see lower rates.

Re:nas not really

[enoz]

Some might find a talking headless server useful. A small speaker takes up a lot less space (and virtually no power) compared to a monitor.

Re:nas not really

[dreamchaser]

True, one could set it up to give audible alerts and status messages. That wouldn't work for me since my servers are all far away from where I usually sit (they are in the basement, my office at home is on the two floors up from there). In my case I have alerts sent via the network so I am alerted if there is a problem somewhere.

Re:nas not really

[M0pper]

If you want something with more options than FreeNAS, give Openfiler a go. I used it for my internship to build a NAS that exported its drives over iSCSI (one big virtual drive that, at the hardware level, consisted of 6 U320 SCSI drives in RAID6 + another virtual drive made up out of 2 1TB SATA drives in JBOD) and getting it all to work was a breezer. Everything you need can be configured through its web-based UI. A real joy to work with, and it will work as fast and stable as FreeNAS, if you set it up properly.

Re:nas not really

[Anonymous Coward]

adding a different nic via the PCI slot isn't good enough?

Re:nas not really

[msim]

Nice!! thanks for that, downloading the iso as we speak.

Re:nas not really

[Anonymous Coward]

That general rule assumes a large number of machines share a single collision domain. As network utilization increases you end up spending more time dealing with collisions than you do transferring data. So practical efficiency tops out around 30-40%. These days with switches costing as much as a hub most people use switches with full-duplex connections to each machine. Since there are no collisions throughput can approach the limit.

Serial AND Parallel

[simonbp]

Wow, it has a serial and a parallel port! That's great! Now I can hook up both my MS serial bus mouse AND my dot-matrix printer; I'll be in Windows 3.1 heaven!

Re:Serial AND Parallel

[TheQuantumShift]

You may even be able to install one of those new fangled three dee accelerator cards in that PCI slot! Sounds like a bunch of voodoo to me though...

Re:Serial AND Parallel

[flnca]

You'd be surprised: Serial ports are still being used in industrial applications. And who doesn't like to connect text terminals to their computer? ;) (mainframes still use that, but it's also nice for UN*X boxes when you've got problems with a framebuffer driver or X ... really, a null modem cable can be a useful thing!)

And parallel ports are still useful also, many printers still have a Centronics port in addition to the USB port. Often, the parallel port cabling is more reliable (and portable) that USB. Most UN*Xes support parallel port printers, but not all support USB printers properly. :)

Re:Serial AND Parallel

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize you're joking (and I agree that the parallel port is useless), but RS232 is still pretty useful. Especially for working with small embedded systems that this sort of product might be used in.

Re:Serial AND Parallel

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, along with the theme of a MAME box, some of us can use the parallel port for some of those old flash cart devices.

Re:Serial AND Parallel

[sa1lnr]

Don't forget my thirteen year old LaserJet 4L that still works perfectly.

Re:Serial AND Parallel

[trayrace]

Speaking from an electronics hobbyist's point of view, the standard RS-232 serial port is just so much simpler to use and interface than USB. No drivers required, real plug and play. All I need to interface a microcontoller is a simple level converter chip and some lines of code.

Re:Serial AND Parallel

[Anonymous Coward]

OKIs rule. When you get older you'll understand...

Re:Serial AND Parallel

[caution live frogs]

Especially as it's damn hard to find a laptop with a parallel port these days... this would make a great CUPS server for an older LaserJet. If I didn't already have the JetDirect card for mine I'd be really interested in checking this out.

Not to mention my old (but perfectly functional) APC BackUPS requires a serial port for communication. No USB on this one.

Re:Serial AND Parallel

[MilesAttacca]

I happen to have a small portable word processor which uses a serial cable and Xmodem to transfer files to the computer from 1200-19200 baud. (It does only have to send plaintext.) It's great for taking on the go, say, to jot notes in class without the teacher thinking you're surfing the web the whole time. After class, just play with HyperTerminal for a minute, copy the text into OpenOffice.org, and format as you please. A few minutes of your time is a small price to pay to make a free (rescued) word processor useful. Oh, and it has terminal software too -- I use either that or an Apple IIGS as an auxiliary control for my home server, which is invaluable when I screw up and lock up the rest of the system. :P

And I still demand a parallel port, because inkjet supplies cost more than blood, and I have an old dot-matrix with an ink ribbon that I use for my low-intensity printing needs. $5 for the printer and a dozen ribbons, so all I really pay for is the paper. :) Believing in the value of old technology is one of the best ways to save money.

Re:Serial AND Parallel

[LWATCDR]

"I realize you're joking (and I agree that the parallel port is useless), but RS232 is still pretty useful."
You may want to re think that. Take a look here.

http://www.epanorama.net/circuits/parallel_output.html

And here
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/233

And here
http://www.phanderson.com/stamp/intro/intro.html

And here
http://www.maxim-ic.com/appnotes.cfm/an_pk/3230

For your average PC user the parallel port is pretty useless. But for a hardware hacker they are great!

Re:Serial AND Parallel

[skarphace]

UN*X

W*F?

Way out of date chip set and you can better boards

[Joe The Dragon]

Way out of date chip set and you can better boards at the same price for amd and intle systems. 1 667 drr2 ram simm? No gig-e, no DVI, no pci-e, no firewire and so on.

For $100 or less you can get a 780g board with hdmi / DVI, much better on board video, 4 ram slots, pci-e and pci slots, side port ram (some boards), firewire (some boards), gig-e port, and you can use ati hyper flash on them. 740g ones cost less.

can't bother with fans

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought maybe this board would make a good mesh node but anything with a fan is not going to make the cut

Re:can't bother with fans

[ejecta]

I have a via PC2500E board (same as what's in the GPC sold over there in the US), it's a low power cpu but they ship it with a tiny heatsink + fan as that's cheaper than a moderate sized heatsink with no fan. Simply remove puny heatsink, add on moderate sized heatsink and you're good to go.

Personally I find the bucket of old Socket 370 heatsinks I have laying about are great for this purpose, simply drill four mounting holes in them and you're good to go sans fan.

Re:can't bother with fans

[elFarto the 2nd]

The heatsink and fan are on the northbridge, not the CPU. The CPU is the tiny heatsink at the front.

Regards
elFarto

What is the total watts used?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great that the cpu is 4 watts, but how much does the whole motherboard take?

Re:What is the total watts used?

[White Flame]

I don't know, but having multiple heatsinks and the fact that there's a fan on it doesn't bode too well.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[compass46]

And what's the power consumption of one of those boards? This board is made to do simple jobs and do it with little energy consumption.

RS232's not dead? Good!

[FlyByPC]

Nice to see manufacturers still including the venerable RS232 port. It may be old and slow, but it's very easy to work with, if you're an electronics hobbyist -- much simpler than implementing USB connectivity...

Re:RS232's not dead? Good!

[drinkypoo]

I'd guess that this is also intended as a replacement for various DOS-based industrial control systems. It's small enough to fit even in enclosures that had weird custom PCs in them (such as some CNC machines) and yet has the serial and parallel ports needed to control such devices.

Re:RS232's not dead? Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen. R232 may be primitive but for many hobby hw hacks (HHH) you don't need the speed.

Re:RS232's not dead? Good!

[idiotnot]

RS232 is still useful, but there's not much reason these days to have it on the motherboard.

I'd prefer to see more USB ports than RS232 or PS/2 ports.

Re:RS232's not dead? Good!

[MyDixieWrecked]

Also handy for connecting to the serial console of other machines. When you can't ssh in to a machine because you screwed up the firewall, you can ssh into another machine on the network and accesss through the console.

Also handy for configuring managed switches (cisco, netgear, riverbed, juniper, etc).

Keyspan has the USB-serial thing covered, but needing to install drivers can get in the way sometimes.

Re:RS232's not dead? Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

actuly i preffer the usb serialports for my hobby projects. i have some that speaks ttl levels directly so i can avoid those nasty max 232's.
i even have one with a avr programmer and ttl serial port. and also i get 5v from usb to power the mcu's
rs232 serial chips are much easier than using the old ports.

Re:RS232's not dead? Good!

[NormalVisual]

It's a hell of a lot more reliable than USB as well, particularly over any distance, and you almost always get a mechanically-solid connection instead of something flimsy that will work its way loose at the most inopportune time. I generally go out of my way to avoid using USB in an industrial application, much preferring RS-232/485 or Ethernet where possible.

Re:RS232's not dead? Good!

[whoever57]

RS232 is still useful, but there's not much reason these days to have it on the motherboard.

Unless you want to put the system somewhere remote and have console access via the serial port. This way, you can access the machine even if the network interfaces are not working, you can access the grub menu over the serial port.

Re:RS232's not dead? Good!

[symbolset]

Nice to see manufacturers still including the venerable RS232 port. It may be old and slow, but it's very easy to work with, if you're an electronics hobbyist -- much simpler than implementing USB connectivity...

Get out of our way grandpa. We ain't got time for your 115kbps BS. Seriously serial ports and parallel ports have gotta die. And get off my lawn.

Re:RS232's not dead? Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

twat

Re:RS232's not dead? Good!

[Jarik_Tentsu]

I'm glad my EX38-DQ6 doesn't have those things. As you said, 'if you're an electronics hobbyist' it's useful. These things should be on expansion cards, not on the mobo...at the very least, have something like my mobo has - onboard support, but the ports fit on an expansion bracket...so you don't have to use them if you don't need 'em.

~Jarik

Re:RS232's not dead? Good!

[rrohbeck]

RS232 is still very much the standard when it comes to debugging/configuration ports on large external subsystems. Tape libraries and large RAIDs for example, or appliances. I use RS232 ports almost every day.

Very Nice

[idiotnot]

There was something that flew past the other day talking about how Via is going to be the next big player in x86 chips, blah blah blah...

But even in the market Via pioneered, Intel and AMD now have superior offerings, both in performance and TDP.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[ejecta]

Except that board is huge, whereas this is tiny, and this boards power useage is far, far lower.

Small refined things always cost more, even if they aren't as powerful as the 'normal' sized item.

Apples to Orange comparison

[rubeng]

Yeah, but this board seems to come with the CPU - it's really more comparable to one of the VIA mini-ITX boards, not a full blown ATX supply-your-own-processor board.

Re:Apples to Orange comparison

[msim]

well compare the Low power Celeron M compared to the VIA in this wiki article. Im sure the processor list needs to be updated, but you can get a fair idea of power consumption from this article.

Re:Apples to Orange comparison

[msim]

gah, i shoulda previewed this, Via link here

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, is that so? Do the processors in your "better" systems have a 4W TDP? I doubt it. That's what this is about, so shut up.

Oh yea, for that "$100 or less," does yours come with the CPU, as this one does?

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[Anonymous Coward]

this is all about the size and power requirement. its application specific.

Re:Atom-based? That's small!

[Anonymous Coward]

I could sniff a line of them and have a LAN in my sinus cavity! You'll regret that tomorrow...
...again.

Re:Atom-based? That's small!

[ichthyoboy]

Pfffft...I'm waiting for the quark-based boards, but only if Nvidia releases an open-source driver to resonate my video strings!

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[doctorcisco]

You just don't get it. Let me spell it out for ya:

1) This CPU runs on **4 watts!** I'm not sure my cell phone can run on 4 watts in standby.

2) This system board is really, really small. It would make a simply superb POS system, home fileserver/email server/router/allaround network appliance, a great low-power system the size of a trade paperback ... a lot of things like that.

Yeah, the 10/100 ain't so great, but you can always put a GigE NIC in one of the PCI slots.

Let's review: Really small, really low power, really really powerful for its size and power footprint. Lots of neat things one can do with this.

doc

Media Box?

[Telvin_3d]

Hmmmm. Assuming I could get your hands on a PCI graphics card with a modern chipset to offload the video decoding to, any bets on whether one of these would make a nice little media box? As long as the heavy lifting was done off chip I think it could handle 1080p. Heck, assuming said video card was DHCP compliant I could bundle one of these with a BluRay drive, already have all my media on a network drive. Be a nice little all-in-one media center front end box. Low power so should be whisper quiet.

Now, anyone know where I could get my hands on a modern graphics card with a PCI interface? Or what the obvious flaw in my thought process is?

Re:Media Box?

[Runefox]

Video cards have IP addresses now?

That said, the Radeon HD 3450 would be great for that, if only that was a PCI-E slot. A Radeon 9250 or GeForce 6200 is about the most you'll get in PCI nowadays though...

Re:Media Box?

[Runefox]

I stand corrected - One of these Radeon HD 2400's would be great. Apparently X1550's have been made in PCI variants and nobody told me, either.

Re:Media Box?

[Telvin_3d]

I apologize for the transposition. It should have been HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection). It's the protected path DRM that BluRay needs to output properly. I blame the entire IT industry for running out of distinctive acronyms.

Re:Media Box?

[jhol13]

I doubt 1080p, I have not seen that much offloading from graphics processor. But then there's a lot I haven't seen :-)

Besides, it has a fan and has no optical sound output.

Re:Media Box?

[Hadlock]

Fantastic. Now I'm going to start transposing these :(

Re:Media Box?

[Telvin_3d]

Well, some of the new Nvidia and ATI cards will offload almost the entire H.264 and VC-1 decoding. Max out the RAM and I think this thing has a shot at doing smooth 1080p. Won't know for sure until someone does some serious benchmarks.

Re:Media Box?

[atamido]

Even if they offloaded 90% of the work, it'd still probably require more CPU than the ATOM can provide for 1080p. Decoding 1080p h.264 is not a simple task.

Is it just me, or does the...

[thesymbolicfrog]

summary sound like someone creepy looking through sunglasses and a binocular?

"Ooh, a Mini-ITX. I'd use that to attach storage to *my* network, ifyouknowwhatimean. Mmmm... and a *real* parallel port. That would be perfect for some hardware hacking... alone."

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[s0litaire]

But do you get the Processor with that too? Think this board is aimed more at the Home that likes to have a small, quiet, cheap to run file server that can run their chosen OS. NOT a all singing dancing Games playing Bluray viewing / editing beast you think it should be.. :D:D but what do i know I'm just a Slashdot reader...

4 watts?

[iminplaya]

And it needs a fan? My 486 consumes more than that and doesn't even need a heatsink. And what the hell is TDP if it doesn't represent some real mathematical value instead of Madison Avenue mumbo-jumbo?

Re:4 watts?

[evanbd]

If you read the page, the fan is on the northbridge, not the CPU. Which makes me wonder: how much power does the northbridge draw, anyway? And what's the point of a 4 watt CPU if the northbridge draws more than that?

Re:4 watts?

[level_headed_midwest]

945G northbridges are rated somewhere around a dozen watts as they're made on the old 130 nm process node. My laptop has the 945GM and the northbridge actually runs hotter than the CPU, which isn't surprising as the CPU's TDP is a couple watts less (C2D U7500.)

Re:4 watts?

[iminplaya]

If you read the page, the fan is on the northbridge, not the CPU.

Did read it, didn't note it. I guess all that traffic generates a lot of heat.

And what's the point of a 4 watt CPU if the northbridge draws more than that?

Marketing? Makes Intel look all "green" and stuff.

Re:4 watts?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the page, the fan is on the northbridge, not the CPU. Which makes me wonder: how much power does the northbridge draw, anyway? And what's the point of a 4 watt CPU if the northbridge draws more than that? Lol, from the design brief for the 82945G GMCH chipset, the TDP of the chipset used is 22.2W (with system bus of 1066MHz, memory frequency of 667MHz and 2 dimms installed). That's only 5.5x the TPD of the actually cpu attached to it...

Re:4 watts?

[flnca]

If you want a truly low-power board, check out the EFIKA with Freescale MPC5200B processor. It has lower specs that the board in TFA, but consumes less than 10 watts with hard drive, and has RS-232 serial port, USB and NIC. Systems with Freescale MPC5121 and MPC5123 dual-core CPUs are also in the make (see news section). :)

I'm running an EFIKA 5200B board with ATI 9250 graphics card, hard drive and CD burner with Debian Linux. Installation was via USB stick and serial port. :)

Re:4 watts?

[pla]

945G northbridges are rated somewhere around a dozen watts as they're made on the old 130 nm process node.

Well then, perhaps they should have used a nice efficient AMD 580 or 690 series chipset, at 7 and 8 watts, respectively. ;)

Of course, that *still* draws more than this CPU, but the market for boards like this tend to strongly favor fanless. Having a fan, not to support a slightly better CPU but for a mere northbridge, just seems like adding insult to injury, IMO.

Re:4 watts?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the Intel datasheets, the 945GC northbridge has a TDP of 22.2W - nearly six times that of the processor!

http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/designex/307504.htm

Perhaps Intel should concentrate on cutting the power of all the components and not just the processor.

Re:4 watts?

[waldo2020]

yeah, except that they are sooo 2006! They were discontinued in 2007 and now are available at scrap surplus dealers for 100$ until they're gone! The replacement announced 2007, has yet to materialize and is based on a 200$ chip. great! If you are so inclined, you could make an Efika clone with the 20$ SOC Freescale chip (a 400 Mhz PPC), but on a multi layer board, adding flash, ddr and an etherphy, you're still looking at 100$ in qty. So better to go with a COTS Intel mobo, right?

Re:4 watts?

[flnca]

I bought my Efika 5200B for $99 when it was still on regular sale; it still is, it's just through different sales channels.

For us ex-Amiga users, there's currently no hardware alternative, since both MorphOS and AmigaOS 4 require PPC boards; yet, neither of the two has materialized for the Efika yet. (Though, MorphOS 2.0 has been demonstrated on the Efika, it's just not stable yet)

As for the 5121 board, there's been some unofficial announcements, and the official announcement for the new 5123 board seems promising. The price is not really an issue, but of course anything below $100 will be appreciated, I guess! ;-)

They're currently working with Chinese firms to mass market their products; this would also lower the prices. The first Efika was already a huge success, I hope the other ones will be equally successful.

The great advantage of the Efika boards is that they run OpenFirmware, which simplifies porting OSes (and creating your own) a lot. It can boot from virtual any device and supports Amiga file systems and partition tables as well as a few others. It's actually pretty good! :-)

The performance of 400 MHz might look like little, but for AmigaOS 4 or MorphOS, that's like what rocket fuel would be for a car. It would run at 1000 mph! ;-)

Did you know that the Linux kernel is like, a 1000 times slower than the AmigaOS 4 kernel when it comes to task switching? Message roundtrip time for a 300 MHz CPU was about 4 microseconds; that's nothing spectacular (the old A-1000 achieved that under some circumstances -- interrupt-triggering message port -- with a 7.16 MHz 68000 CPU), but it's good enough for the CPU time wasting OSes of today. And it has virtual memory and memory protection as well. Now the only problem is that Hyperion Entertainment and Amiga Inc. began to battle at court for the rights to AmigaOS 4. And MorphOS 2.0 is still not finished. It's a dog's life. For Amiga users, at least. ;-)

But hey, the Efika runs Debian and a dozen of other OSes. That's at least a beginning! :-)

Re:4 watts?

[flnca]

BTW, the version of OpenFirmware that runs on Efika is very, very sophisticated. It even has a virtual machine that runs the BIOS of plug-in cards in x86 emulation, if necessary. (I saw it on the serial terminal when it printed the number of VM cycles spent in the BIOS)

Limited features on that board

[eagl]

Deal killer for that board - no DVI or HDMI output combined with no PCI-e slot. Either the digital vid output or a slot suitable for a reasonably new video card with DVI/HDMI HDCP compliant output would be sufficient, but having neither makes this a rather bad choice for any type of HTPC and of limited use to many others who, like me, think a single analog video out port is a relic from the DOS ages.

That said, for someone who wants a reasonably quick and low power system and doesn't mind an analog video output (car-puter builders?) this would be a great little motherboard.

For me... No DVI and no reasonable way to add fast digital video out means it's not even on my lottery win wishlist.

Re:Limited features on that board

[Slashdot Suxxors]

For me... No DVI and no reasonable way to add fast digital video out means it's not even on my lottery win wishlist.

Why would it be on your lottery win wishlist? It's a hundred bucks. I'm only a student, and a hundred bucks is a lot of money, but it's nothing that can't be saved for.

Re:Limited features on that board

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah I agree entirely!
they didn't even include a second pci slot so I could stack my voodoo 2s!

but in all honesty do you really need your 8 bit nintendo roms in 1080p?

Re:Limited features on that board

[eagl]

My lottery win wishlist is full of stuff that I either can't afford now, or don't want enough to spend any amount on but would like to have if it was either free, or I had so much money I could throw it away on stuff I don't really need or want that much.

Like those little remote control helicopters that keep showing up on woot... I don't care that they're only $7, I simply wouldn't buy them because although I'd like to play with one I'm not willing to spend any money. So unless I can acquire them for free or I win the lottery, I won't get one. But they're neat so they are on my lottery win wishlist.

This motherboard... It doesn't even fit that criteria. I am not interested in anything computer hardware that doesn't have digital output because I have almost no use at all for any electronic device that does not have digital video output. The utility of an analog-only video output approaches zero, for me.

If I ever do decide to run the time machine back half a decade and build something using an analog-only display, then I would be faced with pulling the perfectly good working hardware out of my parts bin, or buying something that isn't any more capable than hardware I discarded 4 years ago. Once again, the utility for acquiring more analog-only hardware approaches zero.

Long-winded answer I suppose, but there it is.

Re:Limited features on that board

[Slashdot Suxxors]

Then this motherboard obviously isn't for you. No one's advertising it as a high-end card that will suit everybody's needs. If digital video-out is mandatory for you, then you're not the target audience.

Re:Limited features on that board

[eagl]

That was half of my point. The other half of my point is that the target audience is probably fairly limited, for no reason other than the lack of digital video output. If the board had DVI or HDMI output, or it had a pci-e expansion slot, in my opinion it would probably appeal to a much larger audience because it's a really neat motherboard that has one deal-killer missing feature.

Even with a dual-slot PCI riser card, it would be tough to turn this board into a good HTPC mobo and a number of HTPC builders would shun it entirely because you can't add two tuner cards and get digital output. It's not possible. Therefore, unlike the original submission and unlike the board promo materials, this board would make a terrible basis for an HTPC machine.

Re:Limited features on that board

[eagl]

Whoops, the original submission doesn't mention HTPC. My mistake. Still, it's been mentioned enough that the point remains mostly valid.

Re:Limited features on that board

[Anonymous Coward]

Also: fanless or GTFO.

Re:Limited features on that board

[symbolset]

apparently if what you want is Intel quad core, dual memory slots, PCI-e and 4 SATA ports with HDMI or two dual-DVI ports you can get it in a mini-ITX form factor from Intel now. They've got the "small is good" religion.

Finally.

Re:Limited features on that board

[begbiezen]

The real bottleneck for hidef video playback would be the processor, as every new tv has vga inputs.
1080p vga looks great.

Re:Limited features on that board

[tweek]

I don't understand people using tuner cards anymore. There is a much more elegant solution that "just works" and can keep the requirements on the system itself down:

http://www.silicondust.com/wiki/products/hdhomerun

I've been using this for about a year now to power my myth setup. I have a myth server in the basement and a frontend upstairs and aside from needing to isolate the network traffic from the frontend to the backend, it works swimmingly.

Re:Limited features on that board

[sricetx]

You might be interested in the GeForce 8200 mini-itx board reviewed here http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/05/20/jetway-jnc62k-geforce-8200-mini-itx/.

It's not available yet in the states, but will be on my lottery win wishlist when it is. Combined with a cheap 45watt Athlon x2, a nice case and a fanless 120w dc-dc power supply, it would make a killer mythtv frontend.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[AKAImBatman]

1) This CPU runs on **4 watts!** I'm not sure my cell phone can run on 4 watts in standby.

My Nokia charger was rated for 1.5 watts. My current Motorola Razr comes with a charger that's rated for ~2.8 watts. Obviously, the wattage of a charger has to be higher than the battery output in order to charge the phone.

Make of it what you will.

Re:RS-232!!

[bitrex]

RS-232 is still a popular communications protocol in industrial/control applications, along with test equipment (i.e. data acquisition as stated in the summary). You can still buy exorbitantly priced RS-232 PCI expansion boards for these applications. The manufacturers of this board are probably looking to get some of that market, hence its inclusion.

Speedy enough for a MAME box?

[bitrex]

For most of the older games it would be fine, but MAME has no support for hardware graphics acceleration. I use MAME on an Athlon X2 4800+, and it still chugs a bit on some "newer" games such as Mortal Kombat 3.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[miscz]

Give up on arguing with those idiots. It's the same kind that compares netbooks/subnotebooks to draggable notebooks.

Re:Atom-based? That's small!

[FooAtWFU]

Hey, my motherboard is made of atoms too!

**Warning** Do not buy from this site

[eudaemon]

Shipping from UK to the USA costs more than the device: they want 52.90GBP for the system, and 59.99GBP for shipping!
Unless you want to pay 219.75 USD for this device, I highly suggest you find a supplier in the United States.

Re:**Warning** Do not buy from this site

[eudaemon]

And they have a 40% restocking fee to boot! Ripoff artists.

Re:**Warning** Do not buy from this site

[code4fun]

Agree. I bought mini-itx boards from logicsupply. I'm sure they'll carry Atom based mini-itx boards when they come out. This will run circles around my 1Ghz Via C7.

Re:**Warning** Do not buy from this site

[youthoftoday]

I love the unilateral everyone-lives-in-the-US assumption...

Exactly!!

[Stoutlimb]

The company I work for is using old bloated PC's with out dated knoppix running on them for computability reasons. Our mission critical industrial hardware runs partially on serial. USB to serial doesn't work, because of conflicts with other apps that use USB. They're always slow, unreliable, and power hogs. Since they are vehicle mounted, it's not uncommon to kill a deep cycle battery after a long days work, thus requiring a boost to start the vehicle. I'll be forwarding these specs to my boss.

Re:Exactly!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Alix1c might just do it for You, as seen at http://www.pcengines.ch/

Re:Exactly!!

[symbolset]

I wish you luck. Legacy ports are the last to go. We need to let go of them if we are to move forward but it's hard for the users that have legacy software that requires it.

Once upon a time "legacy" was something positive you left to following generations. Now it means crap that doesn't work well any more.

Re:Exactly!!

[Anonymous Coward]

PCI serial cards are dirt cheap

Re:Exactly!!

[White Flame]

What "legacy" ports like RS232 offer is incredible simplicity for implementing silicon and power requirements at both ends of the link, versus things like USB or ethernet.

Re:Exactly!!

[DrSkwid]

RS232 is not legacy.

Is it just me?

[Yellow Onion]

or does it seam odd that it has intel HD sound yet doesn't have gigabit eth?

Re:Is it just me?

[enoz]

It has Realtek HD sound.

I don't know if the "High Definition" in the Realtek name actually means anything or is just a marketing ploy.

Re:Is it just me?

[juventasone]

No. In fact a lot more boards currently have an HDA-compatible audio adapter than those that have a gigabit ethernet adapter. This is even more common with big box home PCs.

Re:Is it just me?

[juventasone]

Intel High Definition Audio (HDA) is a standard created by Intel for integrated PC audio. Currently, Intel does not manufacturer or brand any HDA adapters. Realtek however, is one of the most popular manufacturers.

Re:Is it just me?

[Yellow Onion]

It seams better suited for a jukebox than a file server :P

Re:Is it just me?

[enoz]

I stand corrected. I guess it could be referred to as either Intel or Realtek.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[SuperQ]

I don't know which Nokia charger you have, but mine (ACP-12U) is 5.7V, 800mA. That's a bit over 4.5 watts.

I bet some winmo phones run at > 4 watts standby ;-)

For an intel chipset mobo, 4 watts is great. I'm hoping Soekris will come out with something atom-based. A good networking-focused board with that CPU would rock. Not that I'm complaining about the CPU power of my net5501. I just wish there was a good multi-gige network board out there.

SATA Hub?

[Doc Ruby]

Is there as cheap device into which I can plug a half dozen or more SATA HDs that will power them and connect them to a single PC SATA port? A SATA hub that works like a USB hub, even if it doesn't have hotplug functions?

Re:SATA Hub?

[hoxford]

Something like this:
http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ad5sapm-e.asp

or this:

http://www.sataport.com/

Re:SATA Hub?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes - it's called a motherboard.

Re:SATA Hub?

[PayPaI]

Yes Most SATA hosts will support this, some older ones might not.

Re:SATA Hub?

[davmoo]

Dude, I'm not the original poster, but your second link is *exactly* what I've been needing for a project. Thanks for the link!

Intel has a much better board

[Yvan256]

Intel has a much better board than this, erm, intel motherboard: the Intel D201GLY2A Little Valley Mainboard, 79$ in bulk packaging. And yes, that's a mini-ITX with a serial and parallel port and yes that includes the CPU too, an Intel Celeron 220 1.2 GHz, Conroe-L (65 nm) based on Intel Core microarchitecture.

Re:Intel has a much better board

[symbolset]

Cool but the watts are way too high to fit in my RPV airplane.

Re:Intel has a much better board

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wondering ... why's this better, apart from price?

Re:Intel has a much better board

[DJProtoss]

fanless and draws (slightly) less power. Its really quite spiffy, actually

Re:Intel has a much better board

[waldo2020]

and also soon to be discontinued. the Atom designs are replacing this Celeron one.

Oh the TIME(ING)

[Icyfire0573]

I've been searching now for the past few days for some hardware like this. Basically, I have two designs in mind. One being a SBC with PoE and Bluetooth, the other being an SBC with at least 2 ethernet ports a mini-pci (for wireless) and 1 pci-e slot for an the new asterisk boards. If anybody knows of anything like this please let me know.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[QuestionsNotAnswers]

You might have read Amps as Watts - looking at a couple of chargers around the office: 1.5A 5V DC -> 7.5W. A Razr fast charge could easily be 2.8A.

To calculate cellphone average Watts usage:
watts = batteryVoltage * batteryMilliAmpHours / hoursRunningBeforeFlatBattery

Most excellent news for hackers

[zappepcs]

I've been looking for something just about like this for a DVR project. I have the case modded nearly for this project, PSU basically picked. Just need a Motherboard. The basic plan was to remove the VCR mechanism, replace with a DVD/CD player and go from there... This looks like it might work nicely :)

Why does it have a fan?

[Joce640k]

...and not just a fan, a humongous heatsink as well.

Surely they can do better than that. There's no way that board is going to compete with koolu, zonbu, dectop, etc. in the tiny-pc game - they all have machines which are much smaller and suck less power.

I think I'll wait a month or so until somebody figures out the real point of the atom CPU.

Re:Why does it have a fan?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the northbridge heatsink and fan, from the page,

"Note the maximum height component is the fan cooled north bridge chip (45mm above the main board)"

The cpu's is the small tiny heatsink next to it.

Re:Why does it have a fan?

[fitten]

The real point is a shot across the bow of the embedded systems makers. Atom isn't ready to replace ARM and the like, but it is nicely positioned for very small, very light, very portable laptops with long battery life, for example. Atom2 (or whatever it will be) will probably be more in line for small devices would be my guess.

For me, I wish Atom was out a lot sooner (with a good chipset). My Linux server died and I had to replace it. I definitely would have bought an Atom board for it since all it does is sit in a corner serving up files over gbe about 99% of the time. I thought about getting a C7 and such but folks who have used those didn't convince me that it was a good choice... the performance just wasn't there and several said that the boards that were popular either didn't have gbe or couldn't keep it saturated anyway.

Re:Atom-based? That's small!

[Anonymous Coward]

All I saw was "sniff a line" and immediately I thought of cocaine.

Though, a board made out of cocaine would REALLY get you going.

4W CPU with active cooling?

[Lazy Jones]

looks fishy to me ... Most passively cooled northbridges on current mainboards generate more heat, so what's wrong with that CPU? The heatsink seems huge and it still has or needs a fan...

Re:4W CPU with active cooling?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fan isn't cooling the CPU, it's cooling the Northbridge (read the caption on the picture). The ATOM only generates 4W but the Northbridge is much more wasteful than that.

Re:RS-232!!

[jobst]

Its an Intel board and they have that in (most of) their server boards : s3000ahlx. I have 3 of those. I use the boards to control my server room temperature (amongst other things) and nothing beats the easy programming of a RS232 port. Additionally I bought some Kouwell ParPort cards to do some other jobs.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[Anonymous Coward]

The CPU runs on 4 to 8 watts, but the chipset itself consumes up to 22 watts. Sorry, but that's too much.
See http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/designex/307504.htm
No gigabit LAN is a bummer. I'll buy if they reduce power consumption to 10 watts.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[Technician]

1) This CPU runs on **4 watts!** I'm not sure my cell phone can run on 4 watts in standby.

I'm thinking auto NAV/Entertainment PC. My 1KW inverter uses 4 watts on standby and I leave it on all the time. Think of it as a no boot time GPS NAV unit/media box. With a hard drive, I could load all 20 or so map CDs for my TOPO map and be all set for some serious backroads fun.

Well there's the shipping...

[Twisted64]

...and then the costs of going to the US to pick it up. I don't think many people actually ignore shipping costs when purchasing online.

Just regular Intel desktop boards

[juventasone]

This is just an Intel D945GCLF: the price point will be about $60 USD, and it will be available everywhere by next month. It's very similar to the Intel D201GLY2 which has been available for the past year and sells for about the same price. The CPUs are an Atom 230 and Celeron 220 respectively. I assume they gave them those model numbers purposely so that those comparing would realize they're very similar, but the Atom is a slight notch above.

Supplier in USA

[athloi]

http://www.mini-box.com/Intel-D945GCLF-Mini-ITX-Motherboard

$80

I think this box would be an ideal computing appliance for the average user. Of course, I would recommend CentOS and a carefully configured set of applications and GUI.

Think, like, your mom and dad checking their email and looking for bargains on Craigslist. At 4 watts.

Re:Supplier in USA

[pimpimpim]

Yeah, I was thinking the same about mini-itx board for a long time, too. Maybe this board is a bit cheaper, but I found any mini-itx configuration I looked for until now to have a higher price/performance than a mac-mini. It's not just the board, you'll still need the power supply, memory, HD, enclosure, maybe DVD drive etc. I guess that for mom and dad a mac-mini or EEE would be a better choice, because it's about the same price, but both the hardware and the OS are standardized. They will be able to solve some software problems all by themselves without having to ask you. And you will save time fine-tuning your CentOS install.

That said, this motherboard might find its way into linux preinstalled boxes, although more likely the motherboards for mom-and-dad PCs won't have the parallel and serial port. This motherboard will then have to find its way into industrial applications then, where these legacy ports are of main importance. Pretty neat little thing, though, can't wait until I get my hands on a nice Atom-based laptop.

Re:Supplier in USA

[Anonymous Coward]

Mini-Box/iTuner? I had to challenge the charge with Amex after I returned defective merchandise to them and they failed to credit my account for months.

Caveat emptor.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[enoz]

The ACP-12U appears to be a Travel Charger, meaning that it charges a phone much faster than a regular charger by supplying a higher current (perhaps at the cost of battery life).

This charger's maximum output rating is not a reasonable measure of the phone's usage.

Atom x86 1.6GHz runs slower than P/// 700 MHz

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a slow mofo, even the fastest one clocked at 1.6 GHz (2.6 watts)

The super-slow 800 MHz is 0.5 watt (500mW) but some say at deepest sleep it still sucks 100mW so not usable for small battery devices which may have only 3 or 4 total watts available. Translate: about a half day when suspended compared to a typical small (phone) device that can last 100+ hours when suspended and that's with the cell radio alive.

Re:Atom-based? That's small!

[shipbrick]

yeah, but now it comes with more molecules! On that reference of humor Idiocracy , I just saw a real sports drink commercial that said "now with 25% more electrolytes!"

Every version of this you could want

[coyote4til7]

I spent a few minutes googling and came up with a US supplier with various mini-itx logic boards. One has gigabit ethernet. Others have HDMI, DVI and more:

http://www.mini-box.com/s.nl/sc.8/category.100/.f

And no... I have no connection with them ... but if they want to thank me for the plug, I could put some of these to use...

Seems like I also hit another page that had mini-itx boards with a Duo 2 processor. Now, I just need to find one with a Duo 1 processor, put it in a tiny metal case and use to cook breakfast. :-)

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[Anonymous Coward]

And what is the power consumption of that atom board, much much higher than a VIA CX700 and Eden based board. It is a stinking power pig!

Better than other Mini-ITX boards?

[tji]

There are quite a few Mini-ITX options out there today.. Many of them are based on VIA CPUs (low power x86 compatible). Since the form factor is nothing groundbreaking, what is the advantage of this board?

Is the "Atom" faster than a VIA C7? The C7 is not far behind the Atom in power consumption. With those CPUs, the power usage of all the other components makes the couple watts difference pretty negligible.

To be really intersting, they need a few things:

- Lose the fan. Low power, low heat, low noise.

- Upgrade the GPU. The CPU is relatively slow, but with decent video offload, it could make a great MythTV frontend.

- Add an HDMI, or at least DVI port.

- Shrink the size. Yeah, a parallel port is interesting for a couple people out there. But, how about giving them a header on the board and the option to buy a cable for it. For the rest of use, lose the obsolete stuff and shrink the board.

Re:Better than other Mini-ITX boards?

[bwy]

Agree, the EPIA 5000 has been around for years and needs no fan. In this form factor I think a completely solid state solution is ideal.

Re:Better than other Mini-ITX boards?

[juventasone]

Is the "Atom" faster than a VIA C7?

Actually, it is.

Re:Better than other Mini-ITX boards?

[juventasone]

A lot of passively cooled devices will overheat without some airflow in the chassis. That's why the D201GLY2 came with or without a mounted fan. I imagine the D945GCLF would be the same way.

Re:Better than other Mini-ITX boards?

[symbolset]

Is the "Atom" faster than a VIA C7?

By at least twice, yes.

The next generation chipset will have low power. Low power chipsets are available now. This is a development unit.

You're on the right track. Once we're buying millions of them they'll branch out into task-specific platforms.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[TummyX]

1) This CPU runs on **4 watts!** I'm not sure my cell phone can run on 4 watts in standby.

My Nokia charger was rated for 1.5 watts. My current Motorola Razr comes with a charger that's rated for ~2.8 watts. Obviously, the wattage of a charger has to be higher than the battery output in order to charge the phone.

Make of it what you will. Um the charger only has to have higher voltage than the battery.

Brawndo is not just for the future now...

[MsGeek]

Now with 25% more electrolytes! And Caffeine!

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[whoever57]

whereas this is tiny, and this boards power useage is far, far lower.

Why does this board have that great big cooler, with a fan on top? That setup looks like it is designed to take away quite a lot of heat.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[AKAImBatman]

You might have read Amps as Watts

Nope. Just read the label on the charger. Output is 5V at 550 milliamps. 5V * 550mA = 2.75 watts. (I rounded up.) My old Nokia candybar phone had a 5V/300mA charger. Ergo, 1.5 watts.

On that note, I'm rather concerned by your statement. I'd hate to think about what 2.8 AMPS would do to my phone...

Closer Supplier

[cyngus]

Gee, this was hard to find... http://www.mini-box.com/Intel-Mini-ITX-Boards

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[puhuri]

1) This CPU runs on **4 watts!** I'm not sure my cell phone can run on 4 watts in standby.

In cell phone industry they have "3 watt limit" that is the maximum power consumption that a mobile phone can have. It is not about batteries but heat: you do not want burn your hands on mobile.

Yeah, the 10/100 ain't so great, but you can always put a GigE NIC in one of the PCI slots.

If you compare ethernet power consumption at 10, 100, or 1000 Mbit/s, you can see that it rises quite rapidly. For most of time home server is perfectly ok with 10 Mbit/s, when you stream video you may like to have 100 Mbit/s and when transfereing files gigabit is nice. But it is waste to keep 24/7 running server at gigabit.

I've had VIA Epia-based board as home dsl gateway, automation server, video server and dvb vdr box. It is some difference when you have system running 24/7 if it consumes 30W (my epia system with disk powersave) or 150+W (old athlon based computer that has about same cpu power).

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[AKAImBatman]

Um the charger only has to have higher voltage than the battery.

The voltage is the only concern when we're talking about a battery not in use. If the battery isn't being used, a few milliamps will happily charge the battery if the voltage is high enough. If the battery is in use (as it usually is when I plug my phone in) there had better well be more watts pouring in than out!

Up and Atom!

[Piranhaa]

Guess it was just a matter of time for Intel's boards to be up and Atom.

Supplier in canada

[Anonymous Coward]

For canadians check out ncix.com they dont have stock but will ship when they do.

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=30092&vpn=BOXD945GCLF&manufacture=Intel

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[scrib]

You're absolutely right about the applications for this.

The company I work for is building a custom medical device. It doesn't need much in the way of CPU or RAM horsepower, but a cheap board that uses very little power is quite attractive! If this thing can stream video over a USB port, it could be a serious contender for our product. We've tested some very low-end (processor-wise) boards and found smooth video playback to be one of the stumbling blocks. When you are talking about an embedded product, the latest, greatest, power-hungry, heat-producing performance monsters are NOT what you want. You want the best performance per watt using the fewest watts necessary.

An issue for us is also product life-cycle. We need a manufacturer that can assure us N (I don't know N) years of production. That's completely off-topic, but I'm definitely going to look into it and find out if this little gem will work for us.

More like around $81

[OrangeTide]

this place has it for $81. Don't quote a UK site if you want to show of a low price :) Poor Brits have to pay way more than Yanks do for electronics.

Re:More like around $81

[IBBoard]

Also, that original price is excluding VAT, so you're talking about £62, or about $120, after they slap on the 17.5%. That's about a 33% discount in the US compared to the UK!

Re:More like around $81

[OrangeTide]

I found a few places selling it for $65. It seems all the places in the US won't actually have any in stock until end of June though. (I called around). I suspect the UK stores are the same.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[caladine]

1) This CPU runs on **4 watts!** I'm not sure my cell phone can run on 4 watts in standby.

Just to give you an idea - even the top of the line smart phone right now doesn't consume anywhere near 4 watts under full load. Atom is an interesting idea for a MID device, but the power consumption is still far too high for too many smaller applications. Let's think about it, if your cell at idle used anywhere near 4 watts in standby, you'd kill the battery in less than two hours with the largest of cell phone batteries.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a PC with an ASUS M3A78-EMH and AthlonX2 4850E that uses about 50 watts under load and about 30 watts idle (not including hard drives). As I understand it, these Atom boards do anywhere from 26 watts idle to about 35 watts under load. Performance wise this Athlon will wipe the floor with the Atom, so it will be "under load" for a shorter period of time than the Atom. In all likelyhood this will result in the Athlon using *less* energy overall than this atom CPU since it can remain idle much longer. Now compare the specs of the ASUS motherboard to the crappy intel one and the comparison tilts in favour of the AMD part significantly. I sure hope Intel has something else up their sleeve, because if this is it then they are in big trouble.

power usage

[Anonymous Coward]

this board was testet a week ago at minitechnet.de, see http://www.minitechnet.de/intel_d945gclf-littlefalls_4.html and scroll down a bit do "stromverbrauch" (power usage) - 25w idle is not a really low score, you ca get that wit an undervolted sempron easily.
Note that the 1.6ghz atom is also pretty weak, it is slower than a celeron 220 at 1.2ghz.

Cant wait to get my hands on one of these...

[conares]

it has home server written all over it. And it could effectivly replace big desktop machines that are just used for surfing the web and email. Hope the quality is as good as the bigger stuff though.

Kontron has one with 10/100/1000

[Tavor]

http://www.minitechnet.de/761.html?&cHash=1&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=4619 Features: * Intel® Atom(TM) processor 1.1 GHz BGA CPU * Intel® US15 Embedded Chipset * FSB 400/533 * 1x DDR2 240 pins DIMM * 2x PCI-Express 1x * 2x SDIO * Flat Panel Display Support by on board LVDS * 1x PCI slot * Up to256MB on board graphics memory * CRT, DVI (optional) * 1x 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet * 8x USB 2.0, 3x RS232C * 1x ATA100 and 2x SATA150/300 IDE Controller * Compact Flash socket on board * High definition audio * TPM (Trusted Platform Module) Onboard * Size: 170 x 170 mm (6.7" x 6.7")

Re:Kontron has one with 10/100/1000

[Anonymous Coward]

A TPM... oh wonderful. I like my motherboards to come with integrated chains to imprison me.

Rules of thumb

[symbolset]

What's that general rule of thumb based on?

For general purposes, it's 10 bits to the byte. 8 for data and 2 for overhead.

Re:Rules of thumb

[Xiph1980]

Ahh... But then it's all decimal afterall! What are we whining about then with Mibibytes and Gibibytes and all that crap :-p

Re:Rules of thumb

[Kjella]

Hmm never heard that for ethernet, but then my GigE is only pushing 3-400Mbit. I do know my 3Gbps SATAII controller only does 300MiB/s though. It's just to add insult to misery after finally figgering out the base differences, like WTF do you mean a byte is NOT eight bits?!

Re:Rules of thumb

[JoelG]

What's that general rule of thumb based on?

For general purposes, it's 10 bits to the byte. 8 for data and 2 for overhead.

I had always understood there were exactly 8 bits to the byte. Overhead eats up additional bits on top of this.

Re:Rules of thumb

[JoelG]

I should also mention that the overhead is composed of packet headers for each preceeding layer to the packet data.

IE: For HTTP traffic the overhead would be as so (in a standard LAN environment)

802.3 Headers (144 Bits)->IP Headers (160 Bits)->TCP Headers (160 Bits)->HTTP Headers (Variable. But usually at least 240 Bits)

This would total about 704 Bits on a good day.

Now consider also the fact that a standard Ethernet Frame can only reach 12,144 Bits (1518 Bytes) you have 5.8% of each packet being eaten up by headers.

So, for a Gigabit Link (1,000,000,000 Bits/Second), you could only see in the best of circumstances 942,000,000 Bits/Second.

Now the rule of thumb is quite a bit different. A typical IP Routing dude would give way for about 8% overhead due to packet headers. This would give a maximum Data Throughput of 920,000,000 Bits/Second.

Now these are theoretical numbers. You have to remember that this is assuming your computer can encapsulate, fragment and assemble the data at the same speed the Gigabit Network card operates. This is not the case!

In actuality, in a typical PC with a Gigabit Network card, you will see (including packet overhead) a data throughput loss of 20% or greater!

Add to this Window Scaling and MTU sizing, and you have yourself quite a few variables that will effect your throughput at any one time.

If you actually want to see this type of throughput you need a high end router that does all of it's packet transport using ASICs and then you might actually get close to the theoretical numbers. In the mean time, if you can get 300Mbit/second off of your PC's Gigabit NIC, consider yourself lucky! :)

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[ejecta]

One thing to remember is "great big" is actually only 45mm - that being said whilst the CPU on this board is low power, northbrigde is, uhm, not so sleek and low powered. That's why personally I favour VIA low power implementations as they pay attention to the entire motherboard power usage as opposed to just the CPU or just the north/south bridge, etc.

One thing to note also is, that some of these heatsinks are as small as 20mm x 20mm, so they simply don't have the heat dissipation of a standard cpu heatsink - you can actually swap a fanned via cpu cooler out for an old passive socket 370 cooler without issue due to the added surface area.

Karma sacrifice

[symbolset]

Thanks for the informative link. I hope they offer the nanoitx version soon. I have some robotic applications in mind.

Accentuate the positive

[symbolset]

As long as we're at it, let's point out a 99% efficient PSU to go with it.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[Eivind]

Your cell-phone runs on a lot less than that. Have a look at the battery sometime.

My cellphone has a battery that is 3.6V, 600mah, which works out to 2.16Wh (2.16 W over a period of one hour).

It can stay in standby for aproximately 72 hours before needing recharging, so actual power-consumption should be on the order of 2.16/72 = 0.03W.

Your mileage may vary, there are certainly monster-cellphones that use a lot more power than this. But seeing as my fairly typical cellphone uses on the order of 1% of 4 watts it's probably a fair bet that most cellphones use under 4W.

That's in standby. When talking it uses a lot more, perhaps on the order of a watt or so (which would mean it's empty after 2 hours of talking)

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[beelsebob]

Of note, you don't get a CPU with the boards you're pointing out. But yeh, it's overpriced and pretty crap.

This is a scam, it is not an ATOM platform

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not an ATOM platform.
What you have here is a plain old motherboard.
A few notes:
The real ATOM platform does not have PCI, only PCIe. It does not have SATA, only IDE (poor), It has an HDMI output (actually SVDO). Also the ATOM platform is a 2 chip solution, while this board is a 3 chip solution.
The Atom platform cannot support more than 1Gbyte dram while this board promises 2Gbyte.
Last - the ATOM does not need an heatsink.
See http://www.intel.com/products/centrino/atom/index.htm
for the real stuff.

Re:This is a scam, it is not an ATOM platform

[bestinshow]

Atom is a CPU.

Atom + Paulsbo is the mobile platform. Paulsbo is the single chip chipset that is for mobile internet devices and the like. It isn't high performance, but hopefully it uses far less than the 22W the 945 chipset uses despite being a 130nm product. Atom + Paulsbo uses a CMOS variant of the Intel bus.

Atom is also designed to be used with normal Intel chipsets. This is one such case. For this, you use the SMT-enabled Diamondville Atom CPU which has a normal version of the Intel bus (at 1066MHz IIRC). Sadly the 945 is an old, power hungry chipset.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[symbolset]

That 945 chipset is still using more watts than you would like.

Upgrade to D201GLY2

[Kegetys]

I have had the Intel D201GLY2 for a while now on my Debian based server machine which has worked very well and only cost 57 euros. It has a 1,2GHz Celeron processor(More than enough for everything I need to throw at it, and much faster than the more expensive VIA alternatives) and a SiS chipset, otherwise it seems to be basically the same as this new D945GCLF. That is actually a bit disapointing since I would have expected a bit more, at least an integrated gigabit LAN chip and maybe a PCI-e slot.

For light desktops or media centers I would recommend the new one though as the SiS VGA on the D201GLY2 is really crappy and with poor Linux support.

Don't count VIA out

[symbolset]

But even in the market Via pioneered, Intel and AMD now have superior offerings, both in performance and TDP.

via's got some hot stuff coming out. They're outside the box -- don't count them out. Remember these intel mobos are not PicoItx. Their video harware is open now. It's not yet time to count coup on VIA.

hooray - everything I don't want!

[Anonymous Coward]

No ECC RAM support? Check!
Stupid 4cm fan that'll buzz like a mofo, then fail? Check!
No PCI-E slot, guaranteeing piss-poor video, Gbit ethernet or RAID? Check!
Onboard 10/100, not Gbit? Check!
Only one ethernet, making it harder to use as a router/firewall? Check!
Forced 'Legacy IDE' SATA ports? No AHCI, no eSATA, no NCQ? Check!
DVI? FUCK NO!
No hardware virtualisation functions? Check!
Largely useless PS/2, IDE and parallel ports? Check!
Made in a communist dicatorship with questionable human rights? Check!
BIOS bugs galore? With Chinglish changelogs and a slow website? Check!
Hundreds of pre-teen overclocking options? Check!
A generous 12 month warranty, more than anyone could ever need? Check!
Linux support? You'll let ME find out? Wow, bonus excitement!

Let me know if I missed any...

Re:hooray - everything I don't want!

[MattskEE]

I don't have any of the "missing features" you list on my current desktop computer. I used to be a technophile, but since I became an engineer I'm too busy and lazy for that. Now I use my computer for: internet, watching TV/movies, bittorrent, Mathematica and Matlab (when I work at home), a touch of occasional photo editing (The Gimp), and word processing (Open Office).

My computer has a 3GHZ (or so) P4, a gig of ram, an old 64MB video card, and 1.25TB of hard drive space. The processor is probably way overpowered for what I need. I built it over 4 years ago and haven't had any need to upgrade it it since, and I don't expect that I will need to for another several years. If XP gets too out of date I'll move to Linux before installing the Vista resource hog. I don't know why I'd need any of the features you list unless I was running a server, doing lots of photo/video editing, or playing the latest games, but like most computer users I'm not.

To address you point by point:

ECC: Who cares, it honestly does *not* matter if you have ECC ram.
4cm fan: Have you ever seen a northbridge with a big fan? They don't need big fans. If it matters to you, take it off, replace it with a quieter one, or put on a bigger heatsink.
PCI-E: Most people (including me) can get by on still-available PCI video cards. And people who buy mini-ITX video cards are not usually concerned about RAID. Side note: my work computer just got upgraded with a PCI video card because it has an apparently obscure PCI-E x8 port on the motherboard instead of x16 or AGP.
Gigabit: Again, who cares. It's not a server. I rarely find myself transferring gigabytes of data between two computers on my network.
Only one ethernet: When was the last desktop motherboard you bought with two ethernet ports?
Old SATA: For the third time, it doesn't fucking matter even for most power users.
DVI: All of the several monitors I own still use VGA.
Hardware virtualization: Hell, I don't even know what that means, and I'm too lazy to google it.
PS/2, IDE, parallel: I am typing on my IBM model M keyboard, it's PS/2. Ever try developing stuff to run off USB? It takes a lot more work than a parallel port to implement a USB connection. I know, because I've done both. The IDE may be unnecessary but the biggest cost is in implementing it is either board space or the connector cost itself, and both of those are pretty small.
Made in a communist dictatorship: Yeah, a lot of stuff is made over there if you haven't noticed yet.
"Pre-teen" Overclocking options: Why would that be bad? I won't use them, but I don't mind that they are there. It takes very little engineering, and even less production cost to include that.
12 month warranty too long: Why exactly is it "too long"? Would you prefer a 90 day warranty?
Linux support: Well, that's the only potentially valid point, but since it is using an Intel chipset and Intel graphics, I bet: (A) It is supported, and (B) you can confirm or deny that point easily via a web search.

You should be modded Troll, I don't know why you're +5 Insightful.

Re:hooray - everything I don't want!

[jabuzz]

Summary says makes a great NAS/Firewall device. Without two NIC's it makes a poor firewall device, and without GbE it makes a poor NAS box. Lack of decent SATA is a bit poor as well for NAS.

As for DVI/VGA, a DVI-I connect can carry both analog VGA and digital DVI. Why they persist in putting HD15 connectors on Mini-ITX boards is beyond me.

Re:hooray - everything I don't want!

[caution live frogs]

My current NAS/firewall/router has ISA and PCI (no AGP), a single integrated 10/100 ethernet port plus one add-on 10/100 card, shitty integrated video, no SATA at all, USB 1, and for my purposes it works just fine. I'd be happier if it consumed less power - dual 500 mhz Intel plus a 250 watt PSU isn't exactly energy efficient - but it does what I need it to do. Just because the device doesn't fit your needs doesn't make it a bad device. Mine fit my needs - it was free, and it is old but reliable.

Re:hooray - everything I don't want!

[hlt32]

-1 Troll.

Re:hooray - everything I don't want!

[LWATCDR]

It does have a riser for two PCI slots.
Just enough to add a second NIC or a gigbit nic, and or a raid card or sata card for more IO.

For a home or small office NAS it would be just fine.

Re:hooray - everything I don't want!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have any of the "missing features" you list on my current desktop computer.

Do you seriously intend to use this Atom-thing as a desktop computer ?

I have used several VIA based mini-ITX boards over past years and found exactly the same problems as this guy.

One doesn't use such board because he drives Prius and has to "think green", but because hee needs it for some specific application - be it for some process control, as NAS, as firewall/router, as kiosk unit etc etc and for such needs board has to have versatile and wide I/O support, both in terms of supported standards as in open-source drivers.

There are plenty of opportunities where one might need more than one Ethernet, same goes for fast SATA etc...

ECC: Who cares, it honestly does *not* matter if you have ECC ram.

WRONG! ECC can be useful even on desktop machine ( it did save my bacon more than once on my old Opteron machine), but on something that is embedded in some remote piece of equipment it is very useful, if not essential.

4cm fan: Have you ever seen a northbridge with a big fan? They don't need big fans. If it matters to you, take it off, replace it with a quieter one, or put on a bigger heatsink.

Yes, but that northbridge is 3 feet away from your balls and matter of cleaning its fan is trivial.
OTOH failed fan on soem equipment can be PITA if not even dangerous.

PCI-E: Most people (including me) can get by on still-available PCI video cards. And people who buy mini-ITX video cards are not usually concerned about RAID. Side note: my work computer just got upgraded with a PCI video card because it has an apparently obscure PCI-E x8 port on the motherboard instead of x16 or AGP.

You have obviously never used NAS then. It can be really great thing to have couple of disks in RAID-5 in some small box and be able to access them through Gbit Eth at practically "disk speed" or even faster than local disk. Such board can also be main SOHO firewall/router, email server, wireless AP, gateway, print/file server etc etc. To do that effectively one needs good SATA interfaces and more than one of them, good CPU I/O bandwidth and goot network interfaces...

Gigabit: Again, who cares. It's not a server. I rarely find myself transferring gigabytes of data between two computers on my network.

That's you. OTOH, I DO transfer quite large files routinely. And it doesn't have to be particularly large to painfully feel the difference.
A gig or two is more than enough.

Only one ethernet: When was the last desktop motherboard you bought with two ethernet ports?

I can't remember when was the last time I did not. Second ethernet is VERY useful. Even if you don't have use for second port ATM, it can wait as a spare port if primyry one fails. It happened to me more than once and replugging the ethernet cable sure beats opening the machine and replacing whole motherboard or fiddling with extra network cards...

DVI: All of the several monitors I own still use VGA.

Yes, but quality of the signal can be problematic and you don't have the good flawless auto-setup possibility with VGA.
Last but not least, it costs you power consumption and money for good, very fast A/D and D/A converters that are ultimately superfluous.

Hardware virtualization: Hell, I don't even know what that means, and I'm too lazy to google it.

You said you are engineer. Are you sure about that ?

PS/2, IDE, parallel: I am typing on my IBM model M keyboard, it's PS/2. Ever try developing stuff to run off USB? It takes a lot more work than a parallel port to implement a USB connection.

For these kind of applications PS/2 is basically useless. If you need them, you got them on plenty other conventional boards.

But PS/2 is very closed ( meant for one keyboard and later exypanded to support onbe PS/2 mouse) and slow.

Re:hooray - everything I don't want!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have any of the "missing features" you list on my current desktop computer.

So what?

snip more stuff you don't care about or think you don't need

Again. So what?

Who cares, it honestly does *not* matter if you have ECC ram.

Ah, I apologise. I should have mentioned that I'm running a bank at the top of Mount Everest, and we're going to be taking our operations into outer space soon, so that's why we need ECC memory. We're worried about the radiation flipping bits.

Happy now? Or would you rather turn off the ECC in your processor, your hard disk controller, and your network protocols? Didn't think so. But you're right. I don't need ECC. Intel said so, and you don't have it, and you're an engineer. Silly me.

And the rest of your post is "who cares, I don't need it".

Why on earth would you think I need to be modded troll, just because you've lost interest in new features and you're happy with what you've got? For what it's worth, I'm too lazy to build machines anymore myself. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't love these features in a small low-power system.

Re:hooray - everything I don't want!

[sjames]

The thing is, these are supposed to be a killer embedded platform. The embedded boards I use have NO heatsink or fan and the whole board (counting CPU and RAM) is 5 Watts.

The board here is certainly not a proper embedded system board. It's an old PC miniaturized.

I suppose the grandparent's point is that if you're going to have a heatsink, fan and such, you might as well go for GigE, PCIe and such.

Re:hooray - everything I don't want!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe not right for you, but hardly a Troll any more than you are.

Again, point by point:
ECC: I could go either way, but I have a lot more non-ECC ram. I don't see this as a big deal.
4cm fan: Plenty of north bridge chips come with no fan. See Asus boards for example. Also, since you're too busy and lazy to be a technophile, you should understand not wanting to change the motherboard and lose the warranty.
PCI-E: Most people (except you) cannot even find PCI video cards anymore. Hardly any of them would play back HD TV or movies (those are your applications, right?) Also, many people use mini-itx boxes for raid systems combined with a hardware raid card (pcie + 3ware?).

Gigabit: Again, many people care. What do you need 100mbit for? How do you know it's not a server? It may be serving torrents (that was your application, right?) I personally transfer things around the network quite often. It's because I'm too busy and too lazy to wait for old technology.
Only one ethernet: Most of them now. Welcome to the 21st Century
Old SATA: That depends. For heavily multi-process systems, this becomes very obvious. NCQ wasn't implement because someone was bored.
DVI: Sorry, not all of us have enough desk space for a 21" CRT. And just try finding a new Dell or HP computer that comes with one. Yes, I know you can convert many LCDs, but I'm too busy and too lazy to go through the extra effort to have crappy video for extra work.
Hardware virtualization: Ignorance is always a great argument. The way you phrase it would seem like no one knows what this is and he's obviously just some geek that needs to be put in his place by the football team. Hint: Some of us know what this is.
PS/2, IDE, parallel: I have written applications for both. Here in the 21st century, the world of tomorrow, we have flying cars and things called 'libraries'. These wacky creations of the future allow you to write abstracted layers without having to even look at the underlying hardware! And guess what? They exist for USB -AND- PS/2. I suggest you print this out on your dot matrix printer and read it while smoking a pipe in your armchair.
Made in a communist dictatorship: Another great argument. The OP has a problem with funding them, but since everyone else is doing it, it must be ok? Thanks for giving allowing my conscience that reprieve there.
"Pre-teen" Overclocking options: Mildly annoying, but hardly an argument either way.
12 month warranty too long: I believe the OP meant it was 'too short'. He was using this device called 'sarcasm'. It's sometimes hard to pick up in text so I'll let this one go. Hint: I use it too, can you spot where?
Linux support: It would be nice if this was advertised. That would probably boost sales. But yes, you can easily do a web search and find out if someone else has bought this product and failed to use it for what they wanted. Oh wait, that was the OP's point.

But don't worry. I'm probably a troll too since I have a different point of view and application than you do.

At 4 watts

[symbolset]

With the rest of the motherboard and a 20" LCD that's like 30 Watts. Yeah, that's cool. Especially when you multiply it be the 1 billion people in the developing world who really don't have the watts for a 1KW gaming workstation.

Re:Atom-based? That's small!

[nacturation]

I hear Nostrildamus builds beowulf clusters of those down at the ol'factory.

Board is available world wide, mass produced

[LostMyBeaver]

This board is known as the Intel Little Falls motherboard, it's intended for a new device market dubbed Net Top or something stupid by Intel marketing. The intended goal is to produce a low power, sub $200 PC for e-mail and web surfing.

The board should be available June 3rd worldwide from thousands of vendors. I have already placed orders here in Norway for two of them.

Also, the price listed is obscenely high, I've been seeing them typically in the $60-$70 range.

Totally agree - gigabit is a must...

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree...

nowadays gigabit is a must - it allows remote drive to be as fast as local one...

**Warning** Do not buy from this site _FOR USA_

[IBBoard]

That's better than we get in the UK from the US. Most companies have hardware at a similar numbered price to in the UK (e.g. maybe £100 would sell for $120, which is ~£60 at the current exchange rate, or something equally stupid) and then we don't even get the option of shipping it to the UK! At least they're trying to be international ;)

Also, the whole of /. doesn't reside in and around the US. There are visitors from other countries including Britain and Europe, you know ;)

Re:**Warning** Do not buy from this site _FOR USA_

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, but neither Britain nor Europe are countries. :/

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[weber]

I know I'm slightly off topic here, but since I'm considering making a quit, low power PC for HD (720p and maybe also 1080p) media playing, I'd like to know what other hardware you have in that PC, and if it's a home-built or a brand-name. Could you please elaborate?

All I wonder is...

[hyperz69]

How will this work as a hackintosh. Finally proof you can build a mac mini for less then a mac mini!

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[Anonymous Coward]

1) This CPU runs on **4 watts!** I'm not sure my cell phone can run on 4 watts in standby.
doc Don't get me wrong, I think the atom is very impressive but I'm pretty sure that no cellphone requires 4 watts on standby.

I've just taken the battery out of my nokia 6300 (fairly generic phone in the UK at the moment) and the label says 3.7V and 860mAh. This means the battery stores 3.7 x 0.86 = 3.2 Wh.

Even with light usage I rarely charge the phone more than once every two days. Let's assume it can do 50 hours of standby. This means that standby power requirements are 3.2 / 50 = 0.06 W. I think we can all agree that this is quite a lot less than 4 W.

You want a PS3

[the grace of R'hllor]

So $100 for the box, at least $50 for a decent case and PSU, $100 for a video card that could handle 1080p, $50 for a rudimentary hard drive (storage on network, natch), $200 for a blu-ray drive...

That comes down to about $500 for the whole she-bang.

The flaw in your reasoning is that you want a PS3, which is cheaper, looks better, and is perfectly capable of being a streaming media player out of the box. Also, you can play games on it. I use it currently with TVersity on my main PC, though I've started tinkering with MediaTomb for my linux box to stream the media to the PS3. The only thing it can't handle natively so far is MKV files, which is bloody annoying, but then, you'd also be hard pressed to decode those well on the Atom.

Looking at the motherboard

[bestinshow]

Yeah, the Atom is passively cooled.

Shame that the chipset is so old it requires active cooling. Yes, a high pitched whiny chipset fan, yay! Not.

Seriously, Intel, what is the point of bundling the lovely efficient Atom with the old 945GC + ICH7 chipset? Even the Atom chipset, Paulsbo, is a 130nm creation that probably eats up far more power than Atom itself. Where are the 65nm low power chipsets? AMD's latest integrated chipset is 55nm.

Atom based?

[houghi]

Aren't all things we make atom based? Are there any things that do not have any atoms in them?

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[bestinshow]

This CPU runs on **4 watts!** I'm not sure my cell phone can run on 4 watts in standby. The CPU in your cellphone will run on around 4mW in standby. Yes, milliWatts.

Anyway, this board comes with an old chipset that needs active cooling. That's usually required on chips that typically use over 8W of power. The low power consumption of Atom is meaningless when it is coupled with such an old ugly hog. I think that there are a dozen VIA based mini-ITX boards that would be more suitable candidates for the systems you mention.

Re:RS-232!!

[quenda]

But why put rs-232 on the motherboard!?
The few who want it can get a $5 USB dongle.
Same with PS/2 - if you really want to use that old keyboard and mouse, its $2.xx delivered!

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.1440

So friggin' cheap I haven't even bothered appending a referral code :-)

Why the heat sink?

[CaraCalla]

If the TDP of the Atom CPU is 4W, as the article states, why does the board in the picture have such an impressive heat sink and fan? With that thing you could keep 60W nice and cool. For 4W you wouldn't need a heat sink at all!

Re:Why the heat sink?

[CaraCalla]

Okay, okay - just figured myself: The activley cooled component is the north bridge. The Atom CPU is the small heat sink below. What a shame, really.

Re:RS-232!!

[Smidge204]

A USB dongle is not the same as a genuine RS-232 port. It might be good enough for consumer grade gadgets but it's just an imitation.

Plus, you lose USB ports that way. That PS/2 adapter looks like it'll block at least one adjacent port, maybe all four. Again, it's just an imitation for the real thing. A dedicated port for a dedicated function is going to be better.
=Smidge=

Re:RS-232!!

[quenda]

A USB dongle is not the same as a genuine RS-232 port. You are right. A REAL RS232 port needs a genuine 8-bit 4.77 MHz ISA bus. None of this new-fangled junk.

Re:RS-232!!

[Crizp]

Thing is, RS-232 supports a larger current than USB will, so it can drive more high-powered attachments where USB will fail to supply the needed current.

Some EEPROM burners have this problem when used with USB-to-RS232 converters.

Re:RS-232!!

[Clover_Kicker]

Get over yourself. Some gear is fussy and doesn't work with USB adapters but does work with real serial ports.

It might sound silly, but it's true.

See also PC Connection for US source

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like it is $80 (including CPU?!) in the US:

945GC Mobo + Atom 230

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[s0litaire]

Currently my mobile is running (in standby) = 0.3w / 0.12A / 4.07V / 29.8c You gotta love Nokia "Energy Profiler" :D If your mobile is pulling more than 4 watts then your mobile might have a short somewhere! :D

Re:PS/2

[conureman]

Am I the only one who prefers to avoid the additional overhead of the USB bus? I do use adapters to run my old IBM keyboards with the AT style DIN plugs. If/when those fail, I guess I'll buy some new keyboards. I am trying to avoid mainboards that don't have PS/2, but it is starting to look bad.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[larry bagina]

Have you looked at the EFIKA -- 400mhz PPC (760 MIPS), 128M ram, less than 10 Watts during average usage. I'm planning on getting one for a home linux server unless I can find something nicer.

carputer goodness

[pak9rabid]

That system + this case + this power supply + your favorite touchscreen = kickass carputer setup.

Re:carputer goodness

[WHSuser]

Darn !! The product is now listing at £42 - EU52 - USD 82 !!! Yeah - now I'll get one !!

Re:RS-232!!

[LWATCDR]

Actually I work with RS-232 devices all the time. Most USB serial devices are a real pain. Often they just shut down after some random amount of time. No messing with USB root hub power management or other silliness solves the problem. Put the same device on a PCMCIA seral card or a good Express card serial card and it works like a charm.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[Anonymous Coward]

Home built, pretty simple box actually.

ASUS M3A78-EMH motherboard
AthlonX2 4850E CPU
2GB ram
2x Western Digital SE16 500GB (these were not included in the power measurements)
Antec NSK2480 case

plus all the usual other bits and pieces (dvd drive, cabling, cooling, etc)

Re:RS-232!!

[nurb432]

Some software wont work thru an emulated RS232 dongle.

Take for example ODBII and I. A lot of the software just wont cooperate unless its real.

Re:RS-232!!

[Molochi]

There are a gazillion devices that cannot be made obsolete and refuse to die that use rs-232.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[Anonymous Coward]

This system board is really, really small. It would make a simply superb POS system...

Well, at least we agree on one thing. It would really make a Piece Of Shit system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POS

Re:Atom-based? That's small!

[WHSuser]

Hey - NEWS - the board is now £42.00 - from those UK guys !! http://www.tranquilpc-shop.co.uk/acatalog/Motherboards.html

Legacy-free mobo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anybody make a legacy-free motherboard?

It could probably be even smaller / lower-powered if it didn't have serial, parallel, PS/2, etc., ports.

I want USB (10), Firewire, ethernet, SATA (4), audio-out, DVI (*maybe* 2), and a couple memory slots. That's it. It doesn't even need to be x86.

Not coincidentally, all of these (except memory) are pretty small connectors. I consider this a *good* thing. The point of small connectors is to either have more of them, or make a smaller board. If they keep the legacy connectors around, it defeats one of their main benefits.

Now I know a lot of people need motherboards with legacy connectors -- this is not for you. This is also not for you if you need a potato peeler. Different market, wise guy. But a lot of us want a motherboard and have no use at all for legacy connectors. Surely there's market for at least *one* legacy-free motherboard?

I know about the Mac mini. I have one. They're neat. But for some projects, I just want a $100 motherboard, not a whole computer. If Apple sold the 'mini mobo for $100, I'd buy a couple today, but they don't.

In 2002, Abit released the "AT7 MAX", which was actually legacy-free. A few months later, they added PS/2. I don't think they even make it any more. Also back then, Intel showed off prototype legacy-free boards, but I don't know that they ever shipped one. Trade shows seem to be where Intel says "look how cool we are -- this is what we have the technology to build! but you can't have one".

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[bhtooefr]

The issue is, Intel doesn't have any low-cost, very low-power chipsets.

Then again, that's what the SiS chipset that they used on this board's predecessor, the D201GLY/D201GLY2, is for.

Imagine a beowulf cluster....

[crhylove]

So I've been rather seriously toying around with the idea of putting together a beowulf cluster, just to flex my tech muscles. What would be the most cost effective?

I can get used xboxes from gamestop for $60 each, it looks like soon enough I'll be able to get atom boxes for about $200 each... They also have gamecubes down at gamestop for $50 each.

What is the cheapest way to cluster, and how many nodes would I need to beat any core 2 duo out on the market? And what distro should I use, and can I get real time frame rates in something like ray traced quake 3 at a decent resolution?

rhY

That would be more than my existing boards

[phorm]

I have a few mini-ITX boards C7-based systems. One runs on a 60W power brick with room to spare. That includes the drives, fans, and everything else.

Prior to that I had a 1Ghz Epia that ran on a 36W (12V 3a) brick, including the drives.

35 watts under load seems a bit igh to me.

Why, oh why...

[EkriirkE]

Why are some of these hardware or hacking (but not a combination thereof) articles getting tagged with "hardhack", when it has nothing to do with hacking, and in some cases, not even hardware?


!hardhack

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[egghat]

Heise had an article about a new Atom based ITX Board yesterday. I'm quite sure that it is the same board linked here. There was one particulary interesting fact:

The Thermal Design Power (TDP) of the Atom 230 chip is sth. like 4 to 8 watts while the northbridge with the integrated GPU (945GC) uses 22(!) watts.

Heise.de: Mini-ITX-Board mit Intel-Atom-Prozessor aufgetaucht (Sorry, only available in German)

So I think we'll have to wait for a board that uses a mobile chipset ...

USB introduces extra latency

[Z-MaxX]

It turns out that for real time applications, USB-to-serial converters are a poor solution. For CNC machine control (http://axis.unpythonic.net/, http://www.linuxcnc.org/) the added latency is problematic... see EMC2 Supported Hardware under "Hardware that doesn't work".