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Atom-Based Mini-ITX Motherboard Available

Posted by kdawson on from the small-is-beautiful dept.

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."

16 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. Atom-based? That's small! by YouWantFriesWithThat · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. nas not really by stokessd · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    Sheldon

  3. Serial AND Parallel by simonbp · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

    1. Re:Serial AND Parallel by TheQuantumShift · · Score: 4, Funny

      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...

      --

      Shift happens. Fire it up.
  4. RS232's not dead? Good! by FlyByPC · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:RS232's not dead? Good! by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  5. Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa by ejecta · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  6. Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa by doctorcisco · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  7. 4 watts? by iminplaya · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?
    1. Re:4 watts? by evanbd · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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?

  8. Re:Media Box? by Runefox · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!
  9. Exactly!! by Stoutlimb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  10. Intel has a much better board by Yvan256 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  11. Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  12. hooray - everything I don't want! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

    1. Re:hooray - everything I don't want! by MattskEE · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.