[geeks] Intel Atom MB - Initial Impressions

[nate at portents.com]

> 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.

> 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).

- Nate