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."

nas not really

[stokessd]

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

Sheldon

Re:can't bother with fans

[ejecta]

I have a via PC2500E board (same as what's in the GPC sold over there in the US), it's a low power cpu but they ship it with a tiny heatsink + fan as that's cheaper than a moderate sized heatsink with no fan. Simply remove puny heatsink, add on moderate sized heatsink and you're good to go.

Personally I find the bucket of old Socket 370 heatsinks I have laying about are great for this purpose, simply drill four mounting holes in them and you're good to go sans fan.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[AKAImBatman]

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

My Nokia charger was rated for 1.5 watts. My current Motorola Razr comes with a charger that's rated for ~2.8 watts. Obviously, the wattage of a charger has to be higher than the battery output in order to charge the phone.

Make of it what you will.

Re:RS-232!!

[bitrex]

RS-232 is still a popular communications protocol in industrial/control applications, along with test equipment (i.e. data acquisition as stated in the summary). You can still buy exorbitantly priced RS-232 PCI expansion boards [quatech.com] for these applications. The manufacturers of this board are probably looking to get some of that market, hence its inclusion.

Re:Way out of date chip set and you can better boa

[miscz]

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

**Warning** Do not buy from this site

[eudaemon]

Shipping from UK to the USA costs more than the device: they want 52.90GBP for the system, and 59.99GBP for shipping!
Unless you want to pay 219.75 USD for this device, I highly suggest you find a supplier in the United States.

Intel has a much better board

[Yvan256]

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.

Re:RS-232!!

[jobst]

Its an Intel board and they have that in (most of) their server boards : s3000ahlx [intel.com]. I have 3 of those. I use the boards to control my server room temperature (amongst other things) and nothing beats the easy programming of a RS232 port. Additionally I bought some Kouwell ParPort cards to do some other jobs.

Re:SATA Hub?

[hoxford]

Something like this:
http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ad5sapm-e.asp [addonics.com]

or this:

http://www.sataport.com/ [sataport.com]

Re:4 watts?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Lol, from the design brief for the 82945G GMCH chipset, the TDP of the chipset used is 22.2W (with system bus of 1066MHz, memory frequency of 667MHz and 2 dimms installed). That's only 5.5x the TPD of the actually cpu attached to it...

Supplier in USA

[athloi]

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.

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

[enoz]

The ACP-12U appears to be a Travel Charger [nokiausa.com], meaning that it charges a phone much faster than a regular charger by supplying a higher current (perhaps at the cost of battery life).

This charger's maximum output rating is not a reasonable measure of the phone's usage.

Re:4 watts?

[flnca]

If you want a truly low-power board, check out the EFIKA [pegasosppc.com] with Freescale MPC5200B processor. It has lower specs that the board in TFA, but consumes less than 10 watts with hard drive, and has RS-232 serial port, USB and NIC. Systems with Freescale MPC5121 and MPC5123 dual-core CPUs are also in the make (see news section [genesi-usa.com]). :)

I'm running an EFIKA 5200B board with ATI 9250 graphics card, hard drive and CD burner with Debian Linux. Installation was via USB stick and serial port. :)

Every version of this you could want

[coyote4til7]

I spent a few minutes googling and came up with a US supplier with various mini-itx logic boards. One has gigabit ethernet. Others have HDMI, DVI and more:

http://www.mini-box.com/s.nl/sc.8/category.100/.f [mini-box.com]

And no... I have no connection with them ... but if they want to thank me for the plug, I could put some of these to use...

Seems like I also hit another page that had mini-itx boards with a Duo 2 processor. Now, I just need to find one with a Duo 1 processor, put it in a tiny metal case and use to cook breakfast. :-)

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

[puhuri]

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).

Supplier in canada

[Anonymous Coward]

For canadians check out ncix.com they dont have stock but will ship when they do.

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=30092&vpn=BOXD945GCLF&manufacture=Intel

Kontron has one with 10/100/1000

[Tavor]

http://www.minitechnet.de/761.html?&cHash=1&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=4619 [minitechnet.de] Features: * Intel® Atom(TM) processor 1.1 GHz BGA CPU * Intel® US15 Embedded Chipset * FSB 400/533 * 1x DDR2 240 pins DIMM * 2x PCI-Express 1x * 2x SDIO * Flat Panel Display Support by on board LVDS * 1x PCI slot * Up to256MB on board graphics memory * CRT, DVI (optional) * 1x 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet * 8x USB 2.0, 3x RS232C * 1x ATA100 and 2x SATA150/300 IDE Controller * Compact Flash socket on board * High definition audio * TPM (Trusted Platform Module) Onboard * Size: 170 x 170 mm (6.7" x 6.7")

Rules of thumb

[symbolset]

What's that general rule of thumb based on?

For general purposes, it's 10 bits to the byte. 8 for data and 2 for overhead.

Accentuate the positive

[symbolset]

As long as we're at it, let's point out a 99% efficient PSU [mini-box.com] to go with it.

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

[Eivind]

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:Why does it have a fan?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the northbridge heatsink and fan, from the page,

"Note the maximum height component is the fan cooled north bridge chip (45mm above the main board)"

The cpu's is the small tiny heatsink next to it.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Don't get me wrong, I think the atom is very impressive but I'm pretty sure that no cellphone requires 4 watts on standby.

I've just taken the battery out of my nokia 6300 (fairly generic phone in the UK at the moment) and the label says 3.7V and 860mAh. This means the battery stores 3.7 x 0.86 = 3.2 Wh.

Even with light usage I rarely charge the phone more than once every two days. Let's assume it can do 50 hours of standby. This means that standby power requirements are 3.2 / 50 = 0.06 W. I think we can all agree that this is quite a lot less than 4 W.

Re:Serial AND Parallel

[trayrace]

Speaking from an electronics hobbyist's point of view, the standard RS-232 serial port is just so much simpler to use and interface than USB. No drivers required, real plug and play. All I need to interface a microcontoller is a simple level converter chip and some lines of code.

Re:RS-232!!

[Smidge204]

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=

Re:RS-232!!

[Crizp]

Thing is, RS-232 supports a larger current than USB will, so it can drive more high-powered attachments where USB will fail to supply the needed current.

Some EEPROM burners have this problem when used with USB-to-RS232 converters.

Re:RS-232!!

[Clover_Kicker]

Get over yourself. Some gear is fussy and doesn't work with USB adapters but does work with real serial ports.

It might sound silly, but it's true.

See also PC Connection for US source

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like it is $80 (including CPU?!) in the US:

945GC Mobo + Atom 230 [pcconnection.com]

Re:Rules of thumb

[JoelG]

I should also mention that the overhead is composed of packet headers for each preceeding layer to the packet data.

IE: For HTTP traffic the overhead would be as so (in a standard LAN environment)

802.3 Headers (144 Bits)->IP Headers (160 Bits)->TCP Headers (160 Bits)->HTTP Headers (Variable. But usually at least 240 Bits)

This would total about 704 Bits on a good day.

Now consider also the fact that a standard Ethernet Frame can only reach 12,144 Bits (1518 Bytes) you have 5.8% of each packet being eaten up by headers.

So, for a Gigabit Link (1,000,000,000 Bits/Second), you could only see in the best of circumstances 942,000,000 Bits/Second.

Now the rule of thumb is quite a bit different. A typical IP Routing dude would give way for about 8% overhead due to packet headers. This would give a maximum Data Throughput of 920,000,000 Bits/Second.

Now these are theoretical numbers. You have to remember that this is assuming your computer can encapsulate, fragment and assemble the data at the same speed the Gigabit Network card operates. This is not the case!

In actuality, in a typical PC with a Gigabit Network card, you will see (including packet overhead) a data throughput loss of 20% or greater!

Add to this Window Scaling and MTU sizing, and you have yourself quite a few variables that will effect your throughput at any one time.

If you actually want to see this type of throughput you need a high end router that does all of it's packet transport using ASICs and then you might actually get close to the theoretical numbers. In the mean time, if you can get 300Mbit/second off of your PC's Gigabit NIC, consider yourself lucky! :)