Jetway NC92 Atom IPC Motherboard

[drag]

Well here are some benchmarks on Nano vs Atom for Windows XP:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardw...o-review.ars/1

I think the graphics situation for Linux would be quite a bit different, since I never was impressed by the quality of Via's drivers. However you can do XvMC with Via systems, I think, so media performance in Linux would be better, but not close to what it is in XP. Just speculating.

Also I think the Atom's dual core version would be a big advantage. Even if not in raw processing power, but certainly in multitasking and responsiveness.

So the Nano is a bit faster and uses less energy. At least in XP.

The Atom boards used here and those benchmarks are obviously very optimized for price. The killer feature for these Atom + 945G mini-itx boards is that the comparable Via system is as much as 2-3x more expensive.

[bnolsen]

I have a DG945GCLF2. I'm using it to replace the outrageously old & loud dual athlon mpx system I had been using basically as an xterm (real work gets done on a dual quad 64bit).

I thought it might be interesting to be able to do some testing on the atom which may likely be the base core used in the intel parallel video co processor used next year. That and it's cheap.

I paired it up with a pci 2400pro, replaced the north bridge fan with a double thick 40mm kaze fan (can't hear it) and stuck it in an Apex MI-100 case with a 120mm fan "mod". I have it hooked up to a 24" 1920x1200 screen (needed the digital out on the pci card).

It's an okay system, not great. Comparable with the old MPX, except this one is fully 64bit (no more 32 bit machines running in the office, yeah!).

The key to getting this board to run stable is to turn off automatc fan control. Apparently errors in intel's bios code for the fan control.

For some reason frequency scaling isn't working at all, the cpu is locked at 1.6GHz currently.

I can run tests if anyone likes.

Btw here's some numbers (important to me at least).

Compilation of our c++ math library (29 files), 64bit, gcc 4.3.2-r1

- clovertown 1.6 x8: -j9

real 0m9.713s
user 0m32.600s
sys 0m2.840s

- athlon 4200x2: -j3

real 0m16.389s
user 0m29.626s
sys 0m2.380s

- D945GCLF2: -j5

real 0m38.110s
user 2m17.471s
sys 0m6.770s

In comparison the athlonmp 2200+ x2 -j3 ~0m30s, but that's compiling 32bit code

[Milyardo]

Terminals generally can't do email, browsing, office tools, and the like.

Email - http://www.washington.edu/pine/
Browsing - http://lynx.isc.org/
Office Tools - http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
the like - http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/

[Kano]

Atom for desktop is a joke. If you really need to compile the cheapest 45 nm dual core from any brand will be much better suited together with a recent board with onboard vga. The very old chipset Intel 945 uses much more power than the CPU itself. The CPU does not have got any powersaveing features but the newer ones always do - in idle mode you will much and you don't have got enough speed to playback hd media without help of a GPU.

[bnolsen]

Atom for desktop is a joke. If you really need to compile the cheapest 45 nm dual core from any brand will be much better suited together with a recent board with onboard vga. The very old chipset Intel 945 uses much more power than the CPU itself. The CPU does not have got any powersaveing features but the newer ones always do - in idle mode you will much and you don't have got enough speed to playback hd media without help of a GPU.

Well, considering I have a dual quad harpertown setup with 16GB of ram for day to day working I suspect I have what I need for normal compiling.

HD media is absolutely not a a priority for me, and not for most people in general.

My acer aspire one does a fine job of playing xvid/divx/h264 encoding and plays hulu smoothly enough to be tolerable. That and my wife has begun to take that over. The atom on the aspire one is comparable if not slightly faster than the 1.2 P3 tulatain (?) that's on her old laptop.

I will agree with you about some things. Intel crippled this board entirely, and they did it on purpose to not cannibalize their higher profit market. I personally got this board because the "company" needs to be broke by end of year and this seemed like a good "play" purchase and definitely a VERY GOOD cpu to throw into the mix for testing software.

Just making these following tweaks would make this board able to handle about 90% of people's needs in order of importance.

- 950 chipset instead of 945 with DVI-D or HDMI out.
- PCIe x16 instead of PCI
- Dual channel memory instead of single channel.