Intel D945GCLF2
Posted: Mon Jul 13, 2009 3:52 pm
I know most of the people on this board prefer watercooled set-ups with monstrous graphics cards in hulking towers, but I happen to have a penchant for ultra-tiny PCs.
I built a couple of computers based on the D945GCLF2 board and I must say I'm pretty amazed at the performance of these little puppies.
It makes for a very nice Hackintosh with little to no configuration. It was also able to run a clean install of Windows Vista Ultimate w/Aero turned on quite well. Performance under Windows 7 is much better than in Vista.
Under XP, this is pretty speedy for simple tasks. Without any gunk (software) installed, it turns on and shuts down fairly quickly.
What I'm most impressed about, though, is it can easily handle running 2 virtual machines (Apache 2.2.11/PHP 5.2.8/Python 2.6 and XAMPP 1.7.1) at the same time whereas a $2,000 Dell Dimension 8200 PIV 1.7GHz has trouble running just one and that's without any apps installed yet. Since it's dual-core, it's possible to have the virtual machines running in the background and still use the computer for simple web surfing, email or other similar office tasks. I used to have the virtual machines running in the File Server/Media Encoder/PVR PC in my signature but I had to move them elsewhere because the battery on the UPS died and I'm still awaiting the replacement. It's also become much hotter now that it's summer and having the File Server on can easily add 5~10C to room temp. Unfortunately, the only PC I can move the VMs to is the Atom. All my other PCs don't have the free space to accomodate them. Well my unRAID server has but I'm not about to put it out of commission for weeks (probably longer) while I figure out how to get virtualization software working. So with a bit of trepidation, I installed Virtual PC on the Atom build and copied over the two VMs. Fired them up and I was pleasantly surprised to see there was no noticeable difference in performance. PHP scripts seemed to execute around the same time as in my regular file server. Multiple web page requests (~50) were served pretty quickly. Mind you, I'm not running any heavy load. The two VMs are mostly for (hobbyist/amaturish) development purposes and only I have access to the web servers. I'm thinking of learning about databases so we'll see how well the Atom will cope with that.
For the most part, I'm very pleased with it and it has exceeded my expectations.
I built a couple of computers based on the D945GCLF2 board and I must say I'm pretty amazed at the performance of these little puppies.
It makes for a very nice Hackintosh with little to no configuration. It was also able to run a clean install of Windows Vista Ultimate w/Aero turned on quite well. Performance under Windows 7 is much better than in Vista.
Under XP, this is pretty speedy for simple tasks. Without any gunk (software) installed, it turns on and shuts down fairly quickly.
What I'm most impressed about, though, is it can easily handle running 2 virtual machines (Apache 2.2.11/PHP 5.2.8/Python 2.6 and XAMPP 1.7.1) at the same time whereas a $2,000 Dell Dimension 8200 PIV 1.7GHz has trouble running just one and that's without any apps installed yet. Since it's dual-core, it's possible to have the virtual machines running in the background and still use the computer for simple web surfing, email or other similar office tasks. I used to have the virtual machines running in the File Server/Media Encoder/PVR PC in my signature but I had to move them elsewhere because the battery on the UPS died and I'm still awaiting the replacement. It's also become much hotter now that it's summer and having the File Server on can easily add 5~10C to room temp. Unfortunately, the only PC I can move the VMs to is the Atom. All my other PCs don't have the free space to accomodate them. Well my unRAID server has but I'm not about to put it out of commission for weeks (probably longer) while I figure out how to get virtualization software working. So with a bit of trepidation, I installed Virtual PC on the Atom build and copied over the two VMs. Fired them up and I was pleasantly surprised to see there was no noticeable difference in performance. PHP scripts seemed to execute around the same time as in my regular file server. Multiple web page requests (~50) were served pretty quickly. Mind you, I'm not running any heavy load. The two VMs are mostly for (hobbyist/amaturish) development purposes and only I have access to the web servers. I'm thinking of learning about databases so we'll see how well the Atom will cope with that.
For the most part, I'm very pleased with it and it has exceeded my expectations.
. You have experience with these.