More Thoughts on Intel's Little Valley Mini-ITX Board
The Intel D201GLY mini-itx mainboard I ordered arrived today. This little board has got me very excited. It is small, low-cost (around $80), low-power, and still has a lot going for it. While some are complaining about the SiS graphics chip, or the active CPU cooling fan, I'm more concerned with the 1GB limit on RAM. I would much prefer the ability to stack 2 or more gigabytes of RAM in there.
What else do I like about this board? I like that it has the following technical specifications:
To me, this board is nothing fancy: it's just going to work very well. With the relatively fast bus and decent sized L2 cache, the system should have very low latency for small (hint: web-based) tasks.
My plan is to first test the average power consumption of this board. I hope it will consume less than 25 watts of power with a ram chip, a 3.5" hard drive, and an additional 10/100 ethernet card, but that might be too much to ask for. 35 watts would be acceptable. Much more than that and I'll stick with the Via C7-M, which has very low power consumption, but a much smaller cache and possibly slower fsb.
Next, I will ensure that the on-board ethernet adapter is supported by linux and freebsd. If so, the board will be a candidate for m0n0wall based installations, as well as high-availability clusters.
At that point, I'll add another ethernet card, likely a 3Com 3C509, known for its reliability, stability, and solid performance.
Depending on whether the box is destined to be an embedded network appliance (i.e. m0n0wall-based), or a web / database / file server, I'll either pair it with a hard drive or a disk-on-module.
Is this fun or what?
Intel Little Valley D201GLY Pictures
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