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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."

4 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. 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!

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 Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa by doctorcisco · · Score: 5, Insightful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

  4. 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?