Atom-Based Mini-ITX Motherboard Available

LWATCDR writes "A company out of the UK is selling an Intel Atom-based Mini-ITX motherboard. It has a riser for two PCI cards, two SATA ports, and an IDE ports so it could make a great little NAS, firewall, MAME box, or low-power workstation. To add to the fun it has a real parallel port 'perfect for hardware hacking,' a real RS-232 port 'perfect for data acquisition,' and two USB ports. The price is around $100, give or take, and hopefully it will come down over time. All in all a nice system to run Linux, WindowsXP, BSD, or maybe even OpenSolaris on."

Atom-based? That's small!

I could sniff a line of them and have a LAN in my sinus cavity!

nas not really

I thought it would make a great mini NAS nut it only has a 10/100 nic. That was a bummer

Sheldon

Serial AND Parallel

Wow, it has a serial and a parallel port! That's great! Now I can hook up both my MS serial bus mouse AND my dot-matrix printer; I'll be in Windows 3.1 heaven!

Re:Serial AND Parallel

You may even be able to install one of those new fangled three dee accelerator cards in that PCI slot! Sounds like a bunch of voodoo to me though...

What is the total watts used?

Great that the cpu is 4 watts, but how much does the whole motherboard take?

RS232's not dead? Good!

Nice to see manufacturers still including the venerable RS232 port. It may be old and slow, but it's very easy to work with, if you're an electronics hobbyist -- much simpler than implementing USB connectivity...

Re:RS232's not dead? Good!

I'd guess that this is also intended as a replacement for various DOS-based industrial control systems. It's small enough to fit even in enclosures that had weird custom PCs in them (such as some CNC machines) and yet has the serial and parallel ports needed to control such devices.

Exactly!!

The company I work for is using old bloated PC's with out dated knoppix running on them for computability reasons. Our mission critical industrial hardware runs partially on serial. USB to serial doesn't work, because of conflicts with other apps that use USB. They're always slow, unreliable, and power hogs. Since they are vehicle mounted, it's not uncommon to kill a deep cycle battery after a long days work, thus requiring a boost to start the vehicle. I'll be forwarding these specs to my boss.

4 watts?

And it needs a fan? My 486 consumes more than that and doesn't even need a heatsink. And what the hell is TDP [wikipedia.org] if it doesn't represent some real mathematical value instead of Madison Avenue mumbo-jumbo?

Re:4 watts?

If you read the page, the fan is on the northbridge, not the CPU. Which makes me wonder: how much power does the northbridge draw, anyway? And what's the point of a 4 watt CPU if the northbridge draws more than that?

Limited features on that board

Deal killer for that board - no DVI or HDMI output combined with no PCI-e slot. Either the digital vid output or a slot suitable for a reasonably new video card with DVI/HDMI HDCP compliant output would be sufficient, but having neither makes this a rather bad choice for any type of HTPC and of limited use to many others who, like me, think a single analog video out port is a relic from the DOS ages.

That said, for someone who wants a reasonably quick and low power system and doesn't mind an analog video output (car-puter builders?) this would be a great little motherboard.

For me... No DVI and no reasonable way to add fast digital video out means it's not even on my lottery win wishlist.

Intel has a much better board

Intel has a much better board than this, erm, intel motherboard: the Intel D201GLY2A Little Valley Mainboard [logicsupply.com], 79$ in bulk packaging. And yes, that's a mini-ITX with a serial and parallel port and yes that includes the CPU too, an Intel Celeron 220 1.2 GHz, Conroe-L (65 nm) based on Intel Core microarchitecture.

Supplier in USA

http://www.mini-box.com/Intel-D945GCLF-Mini-ITX-Motherboard [mini-box.com]

$80

I think this box would be an ideal computing appliance for the average user. Of course, I would recommend CentOS and a carefully configured set of applications and GUI.

Think, like, your mom and dad checking their email and looking for bargains on Craigslist. At 4 watts.

hooray - everything I don't want!

No ECC RAM support? Check!
Stupid 4cm fan that'll buzz like a mofo, then fail? Check!
No PCI-E slot, guaranteeing piss-poor video, Gbit ethernet or RAID? Check!
Onboard 10/100, not Gbit? Check!
Only one ethernet, making it harder to use as a router/firewall? Check!
Forced 'Legacy IDE' SATA ports? No AHCI, no eSATA, no NCQ? Check!
DVI? FUCK NO!
No hardware virtualisation functions? Check!
Largely useless PS/2, IDE and parallel ports? Check!
Made in a communist dicatorship with questionable human rights? Check!
BIOS bugs galore? With Chinglish changelogs and a slow website? Check!
Hundreds of pre-teen overclocking options? Check!
A generous 12 month warranty, more than anyone could ever need? Check!
Linux support? You'll let ME find out? Wow, bonus excitement!

Let me know if I missed any...

Re:hooray - everything I don't want!

I don't have any of the "missing features" you list on my current desktop computer. I used to be a technophile, but since I became an engineer I'm too busy and lazy for that. Now I use my computer for: internet, watching TV/movies, bittorrent, Mathematica and Matlab (when I work at home), a touch of occasional photo editing (The Gimp), and word processing (Open Office).

My computer has a 3GHZ (or so) P4, a gig of ram, an old 64MB video card, and 1.25TB of hard drive space. The processor is probably way overpowered for what I need. I built it over 4 years ago and haven't had any need to upgrade it it since, and I don't expect that I will need to for another several years. If XP gets too out of date I'll move to Linux before installing the Vista resource hog. I don't know why I'd need any of the features you list unless I was running a server, doing lots of photo/video editing, or playing the latest games, but like most computer users I'm not.

To address you point by point:

ECC: Who cares, it honestly does *not* matter if you have ECC ram.
4cm fan: Have you ever seen a northbridge with a big fan? They don't need big fans. If it matters to you, take it off, replace it with a quieter one, or put on a bigger heatsink.
PCI-E: Most people (including me) can get by on still-available PCI video cards. And people who buy mini-ITX video cards are not usually concerned about RAID. Side note: my work computer just got upgraded with a PCI video card because it has an apparently obscure PCI-E x8 port on the motherboard instead of x16 or AGP.
Gigabit: Again, who cares. It's not a server. I rarely find myself transferring gigabytes of data between two computers on my network.
Only one ethernet: When was the last desktop motherboard you bought with two ethernet ports?
Old SATA: For the third time, it doesn't fucking matter even for most power users.
DVI: All of the several monitors I own still use VGA.
Hardware virtualization: Hell, I don't even know what that means, and I'm too lazy to google it.
PS/2, IDE, parallel: I am typing on my IBM model M keyboard, it's PS/2. Ever try developing stuff to run off USB? It takes a lot more work than a parallel port to implement a USB connection. I know, because I've done both. The IDE may be unnecessary but the biggest cost is in implementing it is either board space or the connector cost itself, and both of those are pretty small.
Made in a communist dictatorship: Yeah, a lot of stuff is made over there if you haven't noticed yet.
"Pre-teen" Overclocking options: Why would that be bad? I won't use them, but I don't mind that they are there. It takes very little engineering, and even less production cost to include that.
12 month warranty too long: Why exactly is it "too long"? Would you prefer a 90 day warranty?
Linux support: Well, that's the only potentially valid point, but since it is using an Intel chipset and Intel graphics, I bet: (A) It is supported, and (B) you can confirm or deny that point easily via a web search.

You should be modded Troll, I don't know why you're +5 Insightful.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

And what's the power consumption of one of those boards? This board is made to do simple jobs and do it with little energy consumption.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

I have a PC with an ASUS M3A78-EMH and AthlonX2 4850E that uses about 50 watts under load and about 30 watts idle (not including hard drives). As I understand it, these Atom boards do anywhere from 26 watts idle to about 35 watts under load. Performance wise this Athlon will wipe the floor with the Atom, so it will be "under load" for a shorter period of time than the Atom. In all likelyhood this will result in the Athlon using *less* energy overall than this atom CPU since it can remain idle much longer. Now compare the specs of the ASUS motherboard to the crappy intel one and the comparison tilts in favour of the AMD part significantly. I sure hope Intel has something else up their sleeve, because if this is it then they are in big trouble.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

Except that board is huge, whereas this is tiny, and this boards power useage is far, far lower.

Small refined things always cost more, even if they aren't as powerful as the 'normal' sized item.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

Give up on arguing with those idiots. It's the same kind that compares netbooks/subnotebooks to draggable notebooks.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

You just don't get it. Let me spell it out for ya:

1) This CPU runs on **4 watts!** I'm not sure my cell phone can run on 4 watts in standby.

2) This system board is really, really small. It would make a simply superb POS system, home fileserver/email server/router/allaround network appliance, a great low-power system the size of a trade paperback ... a lot of things like that.

Yeah, the 10/100 ain't so great, but you can always put a GigE NIC in one of the PCI slots.

Let's review: Really small, really low power, really really powerful for its size and power footprint. Lots of neat things one can do with this.

doc

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

1) This CPU runs on **4 watts!** I'm not sure my cell phone can run on 4 watts in standby.

In cell phone industry they have "3 watt limit" that is the maximum power consumption that a mobile phone can have. It is not about batteries but heat: you do not want burn your hands on mobile.

Yeah, the 10/100 ain't so great, but you can always put a GigE NIC in one of the PCI slots.

If you compare ethernet power consumption at 10, 100, or 1000 Mbit/s, you can see that it rises quite rapidly. For most of time home server is perfectly ok with 10 Mbit/s, when you stream video you may like to have 100 Mbit/s and when transfereing files gigabit is nice. But it is waste to keep 24/7 running server at gigabit.

I've had VIA Epia-based board as home dsl gateway, automation server, video server and dvb vdr box. It is some difference when you have system running 24/7 if it consumes 30W (my epia system with disk powersave) or 150+W (old athlon based computer that has about same cpu power).

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

Your cell-phone runs on a lot less than that. Have a look at the battery sometime.

My cellphone has a battery that is 3.6V, 600mah, which works out to 2.16Wh (2.16 W over a period of one hour).

It can stay in standby for aproximately 72 hours before needing recharging, so actual power-consumption should be on the order of 2.16/72 = 0.03W.

Your mileage may vary, there are certainly monster-cellphones that use a lot more power than this. But seeing as my fairly typical cellphone uses on the order of 1% of 4 watts it's probably a fair bet that most cellphones use under 4W.

That's in standby. When talking it uses a lot more, perhaps on the order of a watt or so (which would mean it's empty after 2 hours of talking)

Re:Media Box?

Video cards have IP addresses now?

That said, the Radeon HD 3450 would be great for that, if only that was a PCI-E slot. A Radeon 9250 or GeForce 6200 is about the most you'll get in PCI nowadays though...

**Warning** Do not buy from this site _FOR USA_

That's better than we get in the UK from the US. Most companies have hardware at a similar numbered price to in the UK (e.g. maybe £100 would sell for $120, which is ~£60 at the current exchange rate, or something equally stupid) and then we don't even get the option of shipping it to the UK! At least they're trying to be international ;)

Also, the whole of /. doesn't reside in and around the US. There are visitors from other countries including Britain and Europe, you know ;)

Re:RS-232!!

A USB dongle is not the same as a genuine RS-232 port. It might be good enough for consumer grade gadgets but it's just an imitation.

Plus, you lose USB ports that way. That PS/2 adapter looks like it'll block at least one adjacent port, maybe all four. Again, it's just an imitation for the real thing. A dedicated port for a dedicated function is going to be better.
=Smidge=