[geeks] Intel Atom MB - Initial Impressions

[Lionel Peterson]

On Jun 10, 2008, at 11:03 AM, nate at portents.com wrote:

>> On Mon, Jun 09, 2008 at 10:55:04PM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>>> Hello all,
>>>
>>> My D945GCLF, the low-cost Atom-based MB arrived this morning, and  
>>> I just
>>> threw it in a case and installed WinXP Pro on it tonight (for  
>>> testing, I
>>> plan to also try Solaris, Ubuntu, and Server 2008. All 64-bit.
>
> Yeah I got mine last week, put in that case I mentioned, and it booted
> pfSense just fine.  Haven't set up pfSense yet, so can't attest to
> performance yet (and not having run pfSense before, not sure I'd know
> what's fast anyway).
>
>>> Anyway, so far it looks pretty nice - the MB is reasonably fast for
>>> general desktop use, and the board is dead-silent. Well, almost -  
>>> with
>>> the lid off the case you can hear the chipset fan...
>
> It is very quiet, and no significant heat, which is what I wanted in a
> 24/7 firewall.

Its funny - the silentPC folks think the fan is very loud.

>> What did you end up paying for it and was the price inclusive of CPU
>> and RAM?
>
> I don't know what Lionel paid, but I paid $80 for the Atom motherboard
> (ebay), $37 for 2GB of RAM (newegg), and $56 for the case/power supply
> (newegg).

The same... BTW, I played some apple HD trailers under QuickTime in  
winxp, 480p, 720p, and 1080p displayed fine, but I didn't have any  
speakers connected to see how the audio tracked. The video was very  
good, no artifacts using on-board GMA950 device.

Lionel