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