[geeks] New small Intel Board

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 11:50:17PM +0100, Mark wrote:
> On 5 Jun 2008, at 23:04, Joshua Boyd wrote:
> 
> >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.
> 
> I'm very tempted, but then I think about the cost of adding SATA  
> drives, DDR2 RAM, a Mini ITX case and all the other stuff and I kinda  
> think twice.

I could find I'm terribly mistaken, but I think that Mini ITX boards are
supposed to mount into ATX cases.  If not, I may have to reconsider.

I have spare ram and a spare sata drive.

> I really wanted to use my old Games PC as a media center, does anyone  
> think this thing would struggle with HD video? A PCI TV tuner wouldn't  
> be a problem, and if done right the Intel video isn't to bad for  
> media, apparently. The Mac mini certainly copes okay.

I would guess that how well this does with HD depends on having a
hardware HD compressor and also how well the 945 does at accelerating HD
MPEG2 or H264.