For the latest info on the coolest gadgets, emerging technology and wired madness, subscribe to our full news feed or have it delivered to your inbox. Always free. Always unique. Thanks for visiting!
A UK company has started selling Intel Mini-ITX motherboards with support for the Atom processor. The OEM boards are on the pricey side, but they pack in some cool features that would make for a robust tiny system with an extremely low-energy footprint; the Atom runs on a meager 4W.
The board in question is the D945GCLF and it has all that it needs to build a tiny pocket dynamo. There is one DDR2 slot, supporting up to 2GB of RAM, you also get onboard stereo sound, PCI (with support for 1>2 PCI riser), 2 x USB ports, 2 x SATA (3GBs) ports and an IDE. That makes way for a good range of different hardware configurations.
Taking a look at the back of the D945GCLF and there are two enormous surprises: one is the inclusion of both parallel and RS232 ports (one of each). This opens the way for connecting all kinds of legacy hardware to your system, providing of course you have the drivers to support it; it also opens the way for a bit of creative hardware hacking, 2x PS/2 ports, 2x USB ports, a D-SUB15 (VGA), a 10/100MBit LAN and the sound ports round out the rest of the sockets.
I find myself scratching my head at the inclusion of the parallel and RS-232 ports. Intel probably could have done away with the RS-232 and fitted a couple more USB ports or an extra LAN port for those wanting to make this a perfect Internet gateway. There are bound to be more boards on the market before too long and if you don’t have any specific need for the legacy ports, you might do better to wait a few months. That being said, it does have a riser for two PCI cards which would give you all of the functionality that you would need from a tiny system.
Price: About $100 [Tranquil PC via Slashdot]
Tags: Atom, intel, mini-itx, motherboard
1 response
UbuntuArte » Blog Archive » Mini-ITX, una placa base para el micro Atom
May 20, 2008 at 4:02 pm
[...] La placa en cuestión es el D945GCLF y tiene todo lo que necesita para construir un pequeño sistema de bolsillo. Tiene una ranura DDR2 capaz de soportar hasta 2GB de memoria RAM, sonido estéreo, 2 slots para tarjetas PCI, 2 puertos USB, 2 conexiones SATA (3GBs) y puertos IDE, capaz de ajustarse a diferentes configuraciones de hardware. En la parte trasera del D945GCLF hay dos sorpresas: la inclusión de un puerto paralela y puerto RS232, además de dos puertos USB, conexión D-SUB15 (VGA), una 10/100MBit LAN y conexiones de sonido. El precio sólo por 82€. Fuente. [...]
Leave a Comment