[geeks] New small Intel Board

[Joshua Boyd]

http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/D945GCLF/index.htm

That is a new Atom board.  It is slightly more expensive than the recent
little valley celeron boards, but this time they include Intel graphics
instead of SIS graphics.  So, it might not run Solaris as well as the
LV2, but it probably runs desktop linux a lot better.

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

There it is for sale.

The big honking heatsink is the northbridge chip I believe.

This unit does bring back IDE.

I have gotten a Via PC1.  It certainly works adequately as a linux
server, but I found the graphics to be unacceptably frustrating, with
either of the free drivers or the binary driver.  For just web surfing
and email on a 1280x1024 display, it was fine.  Where it ran into
trouble was with higher resolutions or heavy load.  I could never make
it reliable with my 1680x1050 LCD display.  Every reboot required
fiddling to get it happy.  With any display I tried, the display would
completely freeze or even go blank when doing moderately intensive
things like running WINE applications, or doing large software installs.

I have used Intel 945 graphics (although with a P-D or C2D, not a Atom)
and I found it to perform at least adequately (although I never tried it
with an external wide screen display).  I imagine I'll buy one of these
boards in the near future to replace the P3 I dragged home (the Via
replaced the P3 as a headless under desk server at work for music and
holding video).