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Not sure how i managed to get one yet, given that NZ is usually a technology backwater, but one of my suppliers had a 10 pack of these, and i got one for nz$140. Its an OEM with no manual, or box.
Can confirm the following:
-dual core with hyperthreading and 64 bit instructions, shows up as 4 atom 330 @1600 CPUS. No speedstep according to astra32.
-GbE RTL8168C(P)/8111C(P) PCI-E
-S video
- 6 channel realtek 5657 HD with front panel audio
- s3
-Fan controller on the chasis header, not the MCH header. (controllable either manually by 10% increments from 50- 100% in bios, on auto in bios, or using speedfan incrementally from 0 (literally) to 100% in 1% increments.
The fan is a noisy little sucker for sure, but low profile enough to fit the low height cases like the procase cs3688 i have it at present. I have the north bridge running off the chasis fan header and running at about 40%. ( although note that the manual warns against this). The manual also warns about ensuring active ventilation for the v reg area. So i guess a totally passive system is probably going to be out with this board.
The sensors give some weird readings, fan speed says 4500rpm, when its probably at 1000rpm. All 4 core temps read 3-7 degrees celsius.
I also noticed that if you turn off the north bridge fan, the CPU core temps rise fairly steeply.
Now the power question. The morex 6080 DC-DC board in this case is good for 5 amps on the 5 volt rail. Intel dont yet have documentation on their site for this board , but the D945GCLF manual states that the single core atom baord requires 7.75Amps on the 5V. Add almost another amp for the second core, and i guess ill be upgrading the DC converter to a picopsu (although the 60W plug pack should be fine), although it did run fine during testing.
Knowing it would be close power wise i installed only a slimline cd, with Ubuntu live, and measured the 12 volt dc supply (10 amp range on multimeter) current to 1.85 amps at idle, 2.2 amps at cd spin up, 2.7 amps at cd read. So 2 amps at 12 volts (checked at 11.93) is 24 Watts, and it seems mostly off of the 5 volt rail. This is interesting because it was said that the D20GLY2 board drew more 12 volts.
24 watts i can live with, as some folk have been saying 45W, but i guess they were measureing AC off the wall.
Now i had problems with 2.5 pata drives (again). My attempt to use two kinds of 2.5 to 3.5 inch adapters failed to get a 2.5" pata drive to boot with the dugly board. The OS would install but not boot with a error relating to not enough memory to hold bootloader . This occured with linux and win xp. 3.5 " drives were fine. Now with this D945GCLF2, i tried a new adapter (the modifed 40pin ide ribbon kind) that came with the case, and same problem with differnet errors. Under linux the OS would install but the HDD wouldnt boot, bios reporting no boot disk. Windows XP would get a little further, on one 2.5 disk (WDC 60GB) as far as a XP logo then a c000021A Fatal sysem error (session manager init terminated unexpectedly), and on the older hitachi 40GB, i would get a verbose black screen error (looking to me like a bios error) TRAP EXCEPTION with variable dumps.
I tried disabling a lot of stuff in bios, changing IDE mode from native to legacy, nothing helped. I cant explain this nor could find anything by googling.
After about half a doz failed OS installs, i eventually hit upon a combination of slim line optical drive and slim hdd and adapter that did work. The adapter is lableled HX-IDE-K, this one lets you use a 80pin ide ribbon and a full size molex conecter. XP then installed happily enough, and the driver disk loaded.
Given that the board only has one IDE port then obviously SATA is the way to go, ive orderd a 2.5" 160GB disk to use with it. Also many smaller PSUs only have one smaller power connecter, which is needed for the optical drive.
Performance wise so far it feels about the same as the D201GLY2. Havent had a chance to test it with some video encoding or anything. Will try and post some screenshots later if anyones interested.
P.
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