Customer Reviews

Intel D945GCLF2 Essential Series Mini-ITX DDR2 667 Intel Graphics Integrated Atom Processor Desktop Board - Retail

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

You may need a couple of extra cables and such to build a machine with this board but once you get your computer up and running you will most likely be impressed by what you put together for under 200 bucks. I think I actually built a machine for about 210.00 including a used case and PSU w/o monitor.

My setup has 2 GB of Ram (the max amount), 60 GB SATA Hard Disk. Also, I used a 20 pin PSU to 24 pin Motherboard converter cable as the pins did not match up when trying to plug the stock 20 pin connector into the motherboard--the instructions say this is possible. I use it mainly as a media server and for watching movies through s-video output to my TV set.

Here are a few really nice bits I found out about the D945GCLF2 board after I got it home:

It has a vga and s-video output (no DVI) which can be used in dual display configuration. If you have a TV with an s-video input this can come in handy.

Each of the Atom 330's cores have hyperthreading which amounts to 4 logical processors detected by your operating system--the atom 330
along with it's 945 GPU make the computer run snappy.

Unlike some of the reviews of this board state, it can be used for more than just web browsing. No, you can't play Call of Duty but many 3d games that are a couple of years old run very well. I tried Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness and Oni (which is way old) and they both ran flawlessly.

Ubuntu with Compiz looks stunning.

I put the good stuff first because I really don't have any problems with my computer but here are some glitches I had to work around:

The s-video output has a vertical scrolling issue when the computer
first turns on but clears up when your OS loads. I still can't read the grub boot menu from my TV set. The VGA output has no issues, however. This s-video flicker problem could be solved by a bios update from intel (if we ever get one) in the future.

The board comes with a driver disk for windows so installing 2000/xp/vista is easy. Installing Ubuntu proved to be less than stupidly easy
(it often is stupidly easy these days). The main problem I had was with getting the dual display working with s-video and getting the OS to recognize the two Hyper Threading cores in the atom 330. I solved the
multi core problem by installing Ubuntu 64 bit. Ask a Linux wizard why the 64 bit distro is different in that regard, all I know is that it now recognizes 4 logical processors and I am satisfied with the result.

All and all This machine is pure fun: It's cheap, its small, and it works
better than it should.

First, let me state an obvious thing: this board is not for everyone. It is a small, low-power computer mainboard built, designed and made (although not in that order) to use precisely as that, a small computer.

It measures exactly 17 by 17 centimetres, five centimetres tall. It has an Atom processor running at 1.6 GHz, enough power to run various flavours of Linux and Windows XP, but you don't want to run Vista on it. Why would you want to run Vista at all, I wonder? Well, that's another entirely different question.

It is a very limited board. It has a single memory slot, up to 2 gigs of DDR2 memory, shared with the video chip, which has both a VGA port and a s-video port, so you can plug it to a tv. It also has a single PCI slot, so you can install, let's say, a wireless network internal card or an i/o card. But it has 8 USB ports, so you can plug a lot of stuff. It has a serial and a parallel port, a keyboard and mouse port, both ps/2 style, an ethernet port (1 gbps) and integrated audio ports that sounds good enough. It has two Serial-ATA ports and an EIDE port, no floppy port (who use floppy drives today?) so you can safely plug a couple hard drives and a couple dvd burners.

This is an underpowered board, no doubt about it. But as today's underpowered machines are yesterday power computers, I'd say this baby was like a workhorse computer in 2003, or a server in 2000. It has enough power to decode most HD formats, at least those I've tested. You cad surf the net, play games that doesn't demand a supercomputer to load the splash screen and do general computing chores and tasks, all that using barely 35 watts, including one laptop hdd and one laptop dvd drive, but not the monitor.

Why would you like --or want-- to purchase this baby, then? Two words: embedded computer. I'm building a small machine, so small it fits in an old Nintendo Entertainment System case. Why would I want to do that, you may wonder? Well, first of all, I doubt that a burglar will want my old, battered, ugly NES and instead focus on my shiny Blu-Ray player, that in reality is just a dvd with a shiny sticker. And last but not least, can you imagine your friends' faces when instead of launching Opera in your Wii you fire up Firefox or Chrome in your NES? It's a priceless moment, believe me.

I just built a small system for my daughter with this board. Ubuntu 8.04 installed without a hitch and has everything she needs. She has an office suite, audio playback, movie application, Firefox browser, etc.. and it all works very well. It's not a speed demon but did execute all of the aps I threw at it with no noticeable delays or problems. If all you need is a system with which to do pretty much anything that is not seriously compute intensive, such as gaming, then this is a value that is hard to beat. It plays DIVX moves at 1400x900 just great. The total cost of everything including a multifunction card reader, case, 250G drive, DVD burner, motherboard and 1G memory was under $300. And my daughter loves the shoebox sized case it all fits in. BTW, the 1G Ethernet interface (the previous D945GCLF has 100BT) was a big plus when it came time to transfer files to the new machine.

My goal was to build a low-cost, low power computer to use as a general purpose server that could run whatever service I wanted; primarily a NAS, print server, DHCP server, and possibly a smart house controller and maybe even Asterisk for doing VoIP in the house. I said, maybe. This computer consists of an old ATX tower case, an old but high quality power supply, two Seagate 1.5 Terabyte SATA drives, no CD/DVD drive, and Fedora Core 10 full DVD install as the OS which I installed using a bootable USB thumb drive. That was cool. Since I configured the two SATA drives in a RAID 1 configuration using the Linux software RAID utility, these drives are on 24/7. That's OK because it's best to keep drives one because failures occur at spin-up and spin-down time and the power savings is minimal at best. The catch is that you don't know if the drive is on its last leg till the one day it is power cycled due to an outage. That's why I added a UPS. The result? This computer draws 76 Watts at boot time and less than 35 Watts at any load. The network total throughput averages 300 Mbps without any tweaks or doing jumbo frames. I would like to have seen at least 400 Mbps. I forgot what a USB connected hard drive transfer speed is but I know it's somewhere between 24 and 40 Mbps. The CPU usage never exceeds 30%. And to top this off, the APC 250 Watt UPS reports over 2-hours run time although I haven't tested this. For cooling, I used the slightly noisy cpu fan that came with this board. My old case has a $20 Antec 120mm fan mounted at the rear behind this board and it operate at its slowest speed to suck air out of the machine. I placed the two SATA drives in the first and third 5-1/4 bays and left the second bay front cover off to become the air inlet to the case. I closed up the lower inlet at the case front. The result? The drives are just on the warm side. The CPU and chipset stay cool, and the power supply fan, being thermally controlled, never comes on. Apparently, the power supply is an air inlet too but who cares? Air flow is air flow. Besides, at 35 Watts, this old 350 Watt power supply has an easy job for the rest of its life.

I built a Hackintosh with this board and installed Mac OS 10.5.6 via 10.5.4 using info on the insanelymac forums. The unit might barely play 720p MPEG2 HD video with Quicktime or EyeTV but seems to gag on 1080i or on 720p H.264. But I am not sure that I have the drivers optimized for this board. I'll update if I find out how to get better performance. From the specs, I would have expected it to be almost on par with the last generation Mac Mini Intel Core Duo with Intel Graphics, which can handle 1080i MPEG2.

The system is fine for web browsing, word processing, and even for iPhoto and for standard def Quicktime movies.

Getting the sound chip to work is a hassle. I accidentally got it to work using the hacker community recommendations, and then I reinstalled the OS, and now I can't get it to work again. Only output sound works when it works. I've never gotten the input sound to work. So far, that is in agreement with the hacker community.

The video worked out of the box but treated my monitor as generic. Updating the drivers with the hackers' version fixed that. It can now detect my Viewsonic model. The rest of the hardware just worked, including the gigabit ethernet. Too bad it doesn't have a DVI or HDMI output. I haven't tested the S-Video output. No problem yet (1 week) with the fan others have complained about.

I had parts sitting around (HTPC case, hard disk, DVD-RAM/RW/W drive). I had to buy a 2G DDR2 ram stick for $22. I bought PC-6400 because it is backward compatible with PC-5300. If I bought everything new at today's (discounted or sales) prices, my total cost would be about $230 for the hardware. Not bad. But in about 4 months, I should be able to put together an Nvidia Ion Atom 330 system with much better graphics performance and HDMI and maybe dual monitor support for about the same price. I'll probably pull the Intel board and replace it with the Nvidia board. I'l have to buy some DDR3 memory.

For well under $100 for the MB/CPU and around $300 all-up and ready to go in a case with 2GB of memory and a pair of 500 GB notebook drives, you have a great option for home or small business servers (web, mail, file, print, whatever). Runs circles around an NSLU2 or similar options.

Buy this over the D945GCLF (w/o 2) for both the Atom 330 dual-core CPU (with Hyper-Threading on each core) as well as GigE network adapter (w/o 2 is only 100-BaseT).

Advantages:
* Stable
* Decent BIOS
* Low power consumption -- Well under 40W with a pair of Seagate 5400.6 500GB drives in redundant RAID
* Small size -- Roughly 9x12" footprint, 6" high, in a case
* Reasonable computational power -- Plenty fast to run several jails (pseudo-VMs) under FreeBSD 7.3 hosting both static and dynamic web content, mail, other Internet services, as well as the image resampling required by Wordpress hosting for a few users

Cons:
* Loud fan (can be replaced or undervolted)
* Only 2GB physical memory supported
* Only ships with one SATA cable
* Only 2 SATA connectors
* Only one expansion slot (PCI)

(With a 4-SATA card in place, you can put your OS on a pair of PATA drives and then have 6-SATA for a fileserver.)


FreeBSD sees it as a quad-CPU and has no problems with drivers for the on-board GigE.

Decent, cheap case and PS for this board, Apex MI-100, Apex MI-100 4BAY Desktop Blk 250W ATX12V Mitx

Follow-Up: There is a severe bug in the BIOS and/or MB design of these boards where they will not recognize valid boot drives, even after "resetting" the BIOS and removing board power. It is possible that turning off Wake-On-LAN and setting power-on behavior to be <Stay Off> may clear the condition. Not known yet if these can be reliably restored to more server-friendly states once the drives are being recognized.

Threads potentially helpful for resolution:

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After reading other reviews I decided to purchase this Intel board and an Antec 40mm fan. Sure enough, in under two weeks it started to sound like a cat fight. I voided the warranty and replaced the noisy fan with the Antec - noise problem solved.

I installed it in an Antec ARIA Micro-ATX case and tucked it away in our utility closet. I am using it headless to run Windows Home Server. No complaints, and according to my Kill-A-Watt, it draws less than 50 watts.

This is a amazing board for the money. The features in the BIOS are great for a NAS or even a small web sever. Coupled with 2gigs or RAM, it plows right through Windows 7 Ultimate. Only complaint is the graphics on the board. Even though I didnt expect much. It cant play any High Def. Video Content on Youtube. However, It will play Normal DVDs, which is a very good thing for me. Only other thing is, this Mobo/CPU runs Hott!!! Like too hot for its own good. But I think a good fan should take care of that. Also, the stock fan is a little noisy, so consider a replacement. GET THIS BOARD!

I never got the sound chip to work. I installed the driver CD comes with package. after I install XP home edition. Don't know why sound card just not working.

After two weeks the fan is louder than my new garbage disposal. The mb specs are great for the price point, but the fan needs to be replaced. Has anyone found a drop in replacement?