Small Form Factor New Atom board arrived

So yeah, I bought an Atom based board on pre-order a couple of weeks back and today it has actually arrived

Naturally I have to get some pics, though untill my 300D's battery has charged you'll have to put up with crappy phone pics (sorry):






Look at that tiny CPU heat sink (its the one without the fan):




The N/Bridge fan is 40mm, I'm sure that will make far too much noise:




Pinouts and stuff:



I'll be powering it up in a bit though it'll be running Linux and not Windows as its going into my Nas (I know its only got 2x Sata but I also have a PCI SATA card)

 

Pics of Atom required! I wanna see that midgety wonder.

 

Unpolite question, but what did it cost?

 

only £60 after delivery, I did plan to say actually, it can be found http://www.tranquilpc-shop.co.uk/acatalog/Motherboards.html

As for a pic of the CPU, I WOULD take the HSF off but I'm going to go with keeping the warranty on this board
http://www.cartft.com/catalog/il/934 Has some though

 

more like inevitable question. thats pretty awesome passive cpu, active cooled northbridge

 

Ok, so I just powered it up and that small fan makes much less noise than I was expecting but then the PSU I'm testing with is pretty loud, need to pick up some ram for it actually too because I've just realised I don't have any spare.

 

I'd be interested to hear if you can run it without the NB fan. Intel's other mobos with the same NB don't have a fan.

 

How quick is it? Has any one seen these with proper bench marks compared to an epia?

 

They are cheaper than Vias by a lot over here. 60€ vs. 100-120€ is a pretty good deal I'd say. Going to build a system around this board for my grandparents.

 

Where in germany can you get the board for 60€? I gone be there in August and would be nice to pick one up for cheap while there

 

Yeah they're a lot cheaper, but i've got an epia and i'm thinking of canning it because its a bit slow, its redeemed only by being passively cooled, whacking great bit of aluminium screwed to the case.

 

http://www.zarsys.de/product_info.php?refID=froogle&products_id=372809

 

Mine arrived today as well woot! built it into a nice little system. unfortunately the LAN driver is the Realtek RTL8102EL chip which causes the latest Ubuntu distros (hardy heron 8.04) to crash out during boot. This is a known bug, disabling onboard LAN in bios allows it to boot. The fix is in progress.

I'm running Xubuntu and everything seems snappy, haven't ran any benchmarks yet though. It should do me for a cheap low power server perfectly.

 

Unfortunately, not quite beefy enough for me to run Trixbox on, otherwise I'd jump at it straight away.

I'd like to see how it stands up against an EPIA though.

 

I wonder why they didn't use an Intel nic, they are so much better than the realtek ones, even just in terms of driver support.

 

Just installing Debian now, Sadly I wasn't able to just dump the drive from my old linux box straight into this one, grub kept hanging so at the moment I'm PXE booting so I can install to the CF card I'm using.

Shame really as I had some stuff setup just right (Bind, DHCP, Ushare) but never mind.

 

What's the total expected power consumption of this board with a HHD & RAM going to be do you know?

 

According to a youtube video that I've seen at full whack (loaded with SuperPi) with a 7200RPM desktop drive it was apparently pulling ~40w at the plug monitor.
If you assume that they are possibly out by +/- 5% it's pretty good imo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alasrLTeX8w for video.

I would do my own testing but I dont have a socket power monitor and I don't fancy spending about £20 on one for one test

 

This board will be one my project list when i get back from holiday i assure you! i think together with a 120W PSU 512MB RAM 20GB HHD then connected to a NAS it shall make a great file server.

My problem at the moment is that i have a file server but i don't like leaving it on because i know its pumping at least 400w an hour on top of all the other electrical components in my house, Its a nightmare. Having a file server using one of these boards will easily pay for its self with the amount of money that i won't have to spend on electricity, and the board is probably near enough the same spec when its comes to benchmark as my current file server is using hardware which is at least 4-5 years old anyway.

 

the little fan on the northbridge chip of the motherboard makes quite a little whine when running, i need to look into ways of passive cooling that now. Anyone any ideas?