|
It is possible that turning off Wake-On-LAN and setting power-on behavior to be may clear the condition. 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 usersCons:* 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 MitxFollow-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. 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:[.].
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.
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. I forgot what a USB connected hard drive transfer speed is but I know it's somewhere between 24 and 40 Mbps. Since I configured the two SATA drives in a RAID 1 configuration using the Linux software RAID utility, these drives are on 24/7. 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.
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. The result. I said, maybe. That's why I added a UPS. The CPU usage never exceeds 30%.
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. 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 result. The CPU and chipset stay cool, and the power supply fan, being thermally controlled, never comes on.
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. 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. I closed up the lower inlet at the case front. The network total throughput averages 300 Mbps without any tweaks or doing jumbo frames. Apparently, the power supply is an air inlet too but who cares. That was cool.
Air flow is air flow. This computer draws 76 Watts at boot time and less than 35 Watts at any load. I would like to have seen at least 400 Mbps. The drives are just on the warm side. Besides, at 35 Watts, this old 350 Watt power supply has an easy job for the rest of its life.
I bought PC-6400 because it is backward compatible with PC-5300. But I am not sure that I have the drivers optimized for this board. The unit might barely play 720p MPEG2 HD video with Quicktime or EyeTV but seems to gag on 1080i or on 720p H.264. I'll probably pull the Intel board and replace it with the Nvidia board. I haven't tested the S-Video output. 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 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. 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. Only output sound works when it works. I've never gotten the input sound to work. 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 rest of the hardware just worked, including the gigabit ethernet. Too bad it doesn't have a DVI or HDMI 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. Updating the drivers with the hackers' version fixed that. I'll update if I find out how to get better performance. If I bought everything new at today's (discounted or sales) prices, my total cost would be about $230 for the hardware.
So far, that is in agreement with the hacker community.The video worked out of the box but treated my monitor as generic. It can now detect my Viewsonic model. Not bad. I'l have to buy some DDR3 memory.
I assume it would be okay with Vista. My other Atom motherboard is using an Apex MI-100 case.
Some research said I should see a speed benefit, while others stated there was little or no benefit. I already had an Intel D945GCLF single core board and decided to give the dual core version a try.
I used a 500GB WD "green" SATA hard drive and Liteon Sata DVD writer, 2GB Kingston 667 DDRII Ram, and an Apex MI-008 case with and added 80 mm fan ty-rapped to the existing vent holes. I tend to go with the latter.
Nevertheless, both boards are an excellent product using about 40 watts including all the components when being used. I like the MI-008 better.Speed is decent for most tasks running Windows XP Pro.
I always configure for best performance in the Advanced System Settings regardless of which version.
|
