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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."
I could sniff a line of them and have a LAN in my sinus cavity!
I thought it would make a great mini NAS nut it only has a 10/100 nic. That was a bummer
Sheldon
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!
Great that the cpu is 4 watts, but how much does the whole motherboard take?
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.
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...
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
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.
Two Parts Swash, One Part Buckle
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.
Two Parts Swash, One Part Buckle
You just don't get it. Let me spell it out for ya:
... a lot of things like that.
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
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
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?
What?
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.
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...
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Give up on arguing with those idiots. It's the same kind that compares netbooks/subnotebooks to draggable notebooks.
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.
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.
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.
Something like this:
http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ad5sapm-e.asp
or this:
http://www.sataport.com/
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.
technical writing / development
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).
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.
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)
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...
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 ;)
/. doesn't reside in and around the US. There are visitors from other countries including Britain and Europe, you know ;)
Also, the whole of
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=