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The Board
As you can see below, the board is tiny - it is barely wider than the I/O panel.
Lately I've been getting quite interested in Mini-ITX boards for use as home servers, HTPC's, and nettop boxes - I like the idea of small computers instead of the 18" - 24" monsters we have now. The D945GCLF2 with its dual core Atom 330 processor can easily handle most 'normal' home computing needs, but it is not meant for gamers - mind you, that may be a good thing, as the rugrats are then less likely to confiscate it for gaming!
Here is a closer look at the processor and the Northbridge - isn't it amazing that the processor is passively cooled, yet the chipset requires a fan?
The single DIMM slot is probably the biggest mistake Intel made with this board. Allowing a second DIMM, and thus dual channel memory, would have helped memory performance slightly due to contention between the processor and the on-board graphics - but I guess they really want to differentiate this board as a low-cost essentials board.
There are two SATAII connectors here, which is enough for most small computers, along with an obligatory IDE connector. You can see the battery and the ICH7 chip towards the top of the photo.
Here we see the SP/DIFF connector (black 3 pin connector in the center) along with the Chrontel video encoder for the S-Video output.
Plenty of connectors on the back I/O panel - PS/2 keyboard and mouse, parallel port, serial port, VGA out, four USB2.0, Gigabit Ethernet, S-Video and three audio connectors. I wish they provided an SP/DIFF output jack!
The Stuff
You don't get a lot of extra's with the D945GCLF2:
- I/O shield
- fold-out quick reference guide
- I/O panel and connector sticker for inside the case
- IDE cable
- one SATAII cable
- Driver/Utility CD
- Promo blurb with Atom sticker
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I'm sure a lot of people are still running mobile chips in their systems to scrape by with performance and lower power compared to full on desktop parts. I have a 35w mobile 2500+ xp running -.150v on a media center right now as an example.
From what I hear though the Atom is a good performer if you don't plan to do a lot, the demonstrations seemed to highlight that quite a bit, it would be interesting to see how it would have all panned out had it been out of order execution instead.
M.A.M.E.?
Autocad 2002?
Aspen Engineering Suite?
SimSci Pro-II?
Thanks
Be calm, be polite, be enlightened.
it sure does have Gigabit Ethernet. how could someone solve the redundancy problem, using RAID??? is there any PCI card to do the job???
thanks
HD playback in XP using CoreAVC & MPC-HC works brilliantly (Screen resolution is 1280x1024 at the moment, so its not full HD), but Im playing a 1080p Sample of Transformers.
Tried using XBMC but its horrible and drops frames left, right & center. Apparently it'd be better using the newer ffmpeg builds which better support dual-core CPU's etc, but Im not sure, havent looked into it enough. Was Googl'ing for answers hoping somebody else had when I found this thread.
Have yet to try the XBMC LiveCD to see how it goes, will do soon-ish
Anyway, xp runs a lil faster than Ubuntu, and this beta build of Vista 2 or windows 7(call it what you will) seems to be a lil faster than xp.
Have only had one program that wouldn't install right and it was an old dvd ripping program i bought at wal-mart 5 years ago for $3.95usd.
Other than that everything seems to work correctly but its hard to tell since I've never used Vista, so only comparing to xp.
Theoretically, you could pull a D945GCLF2 out of the box and other than case assembly, you could be up and running in about 20-25 minutes
I have to say this board is a cracker for the cash, overall I liked your review but trying it to run various games, its not what this board is about. I agree if they had used a better chipset the power requirements would have even been better, but for me using an older GPU has meant most of the os's work with it right out of the box.
P.
Thanks!
I've checked in control panel and the drivers appear to have been installed correctly.
Can anyone help me here please - I don't know where to go next.
Thanks
Mike
Sorry for any time wasted by anyone - found the problem. I didn't realise that not only did I have to play with the bios setting but also disable the onboard graphics from within Windows control panel.
Mike
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