[geeks] New small Intel Board

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Mark <md.benson at gmail.com>
>Date: 2008/06/05 Thu PM 06:50:17 EDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] New small Intel Board

>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'll *probably* toss my incoming D945GCLF into a cheap-o "Dynex" chassis I picked up for $20 at Best Buy a while ago (with a 500 watt PS), and a few smaller capacity SATA HDs (lying around) and a $40 2 Gig DDR2 DIMM. I fully anticipate a better Solaris desktop experience and better Linux desktop experience with this board as compared with the D201GLY2 (Little Valley), based on the 945 chipset being better supported than the SiS chipset. Random thought - I wonder if the "hacked" Mac OS X will run on it? ;^)

>Does anyone think it'd be any faster than a Pentium 4 2.8HT?

No. Clock speed, Hyper-threading, possibly larger cache size, and possibly a faster FSB *should* make the P4 2.8HT chip faster, IMHO...

>I know  
>it'd use a lot less power. I'm tempted to lob the P4 board out of my  
>old ex-games PC and replace it with that, just because it's got all  
>the bits there I need and it's a lot more economical.

That is a fine plan, but I don't think it will be faster than the board you are replacing.

>Even though it's  
>in a huge ATX case, which would dwarf the board, it'd still be cool.  
>That way I could buy a decent size Mini ITX case at a later date and  
>transfer the guts over as and when, I've got a 80GB boot drive (SATA)  
>and a 200GB ATA133 kicking about spare...
>
>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.

HD is a stretch on this MB, IMHO. Take a look at the eVGA e-7150 MB[0] - that MB plus a mid-range Core 2 Duo CPU would be a nice upgrade...

Lionel

[0] http://microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0277446