intel atom motherboard review

[wardmundy]

That's considerably higher than the WalMart Special which maxes out at 20 watts and typically measures about 3.

 

[klingon888]

Thanks Slamby and Ward. It does appear that its not as efficient as the Walmart special. And you also mentioned no HDD, no CD-Rom. Cant beat 20 watts maxed with all peripherals!

 

[carlosmp]

had some problems with the irq settings but eventually turned most everything off in the bios and that seemed to do the trick.
Tom

Tom,

Would you care to share what you turned off? I think i've turned everything I can find off, and can't get it to get off of IRQ9... with all the other USB crap.

Thanks,
Carlos

 

[darmock]

Actually I turned off everything but the lan and turned off the USB also. I always turn off stuff I don't use. Cuz it has a TDM400 card in it so far I have not found the need to have usb enabled. Although when I was testing my A1200p from openvox I had the USB turned on and it made no difference it seems worked just great.

You might want to check you bios version also as I seem to remember that some of the boards had an early bios in them. I wish I could remember where I read about that...

Tom

 

[carlosmp]

I did say almost everything...i left USB on, since I'm hoping to use flash memory to backup the config locally, not on the HDD. I can do FTP, but wanted something local. I guess it's going to be either or. I'm going to check the BIOS version just in case.

 

[carlosmp]

One other thing I just got stuck in:

After running a update-source on a new box, I'm getting a kernel panic and seems to point at the r8169 driver. I can rescue the box by booting off the old kernel, and everything works fine with the proper driver, but for some reason the new kernel wants to use the "wrong" driver for the NIC. Any ideas of how to disable it from trying to load? It's crashing right after udev, and can't get into interactive setup to block the driver from coming up.

Thanks in advance,
Carlos.

 

[carlosmp]

Was looking for more elegant solution, but got around it by disabling LAN in BIOS, rebuilding the driver, rebooting, and reenabling the LAN, and one final reboot.

 

[darmock]

the centos 5.2 kernel is incompatible with mb base on the 8101 nic card, well known problem and most of the major linux distros have been hit with this.

you hit on the solution disable the nic install centos, install the 8101 driver, re-enable nic, install pbx. I have written an installer for this driver and it is on the piaf 1.3 rc1 disk. the new piafdl program allows you to exit the install. once you log in you are presented with a menu that allows you to install the r8101 driver then reboot, enable the nic, continue with the install.


i have been holding off the release to see if an official patch to the kernel is forthcoming. if not then there is a workaround.

tom

 

[jlrichar]

Atom Power consumption vs wallmart special

I just finished building a system similar to the wallmart special. I based it on a PC2500G MB with a sata nb drive, and an 80W picoPSU. It draws 23watts at idle as measured at the outlet with a P3 kill-a-watt.

From what I have read about the atom--it should destroy the via cX stuff in power/watt. But it doesn't quite do it yet because it is only offered with the 945gc chipset at the moment--which is a dog power wise (24W TDP + 3W TDP for ICH7). So you have a chip with 4W TDP soldered to a MB with 27W TDP. Admitedly TDP does not equal idle power, which IMHO is the most important power measurement--but based on the discussions above and elsewhere seems to be acceptable to use for comparison purposes.

http://www.heise-online.co.uk/news/Intel-introduces-the-Atom-230-and-Atom-N270--/110855

Evidently if you are OEM you have access to better chipsets--but we are left with just the 945GC at the moment which kind of defeats the purpose of the low power cpu.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/...atom-centrino-based-ktus15-mini-itx-platform/

BTW my ancient dell dimension XPS R400 (400 MHz PII) with 378mb RAM and an ancient 10GB HD idles at 28W according to the P3, and so far it has run PIAF fine.

One more BTW on the subject of power consumption. a fully decked out AMD system with the 780G chipset, and e4850 dual core idles near 50W--which is amazing considering the integrated graphics. I mention it because that chipset-which includes the HD3450 integrated graphics has an idle power of less than a watt.

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/676/12/
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001107.html

Another thought: By the time the atom can compete with via Cx on idle power the via nano will be here. Who knows what that will bring. Probably not reduced idle power since it is designed as a drop in replacement for the c7-d and that chip is not being retired.

At this point it is about chipsets--we need better ones. AMD has indicated that they are going to compete with Atom as well. Clearly they have the best chipsets at the moment--so if they can get geodes revenge or whatever it will be called out with a 55nm chipset it may be the platform of choice. I bet Intel will get their chipsets in order by then though.

Lets hope diamondville gets out soon with a <1W chipset


sorry for the long post--thought all this info would be usefull for power discussions.

 

[cjkeeme]

Thank you. These instructions worked perfectly.

 

[diedaar]

Hi folks,

just a quick heads up.

Got my Intel Atom 330 board yesterday.
Install of PiaF was pretty straight forward execpt for the network driver.
The supplied network driver for Atom boards on the Piaf 1.3 ISO didn't work, but after downloading the file r8168-8.008.00.tar.bz2 (realtek side) and following the enclosed readme file everthing was fine.

So now I need to find some time to configure the box (upgrade FreePBX and install openfire)

Board/CPU stats:

root@pbx:~ $ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 28
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU 330 @ 1.60GHz
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 1659.463
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 4
core id : 0
cpu cores : 2
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat
clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc pni
monitor ds_cpl tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
bogomips : 3193.90

processor : 1
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 28
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU 330 @ 1.60GHz
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 1659.463
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 4
core id : 0
cpu cores : 2
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat
clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc pni
monitor ds_cpl tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
bogomips : 3191.69

processor : 2
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 28
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU 330 @ 1.60GHz
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 1659.463
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 4
core id : 1
cpu cores : 2
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat
clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc pni
monitor ds_cpl tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
bogomips : 3191.73

processor : 3
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 28
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU 330 @ 1.60GHz
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 1659.463
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 4
core id : 1
cpu cores : 2
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat
clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc pni
monitor ds_cpl tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
bogomips : 3191.74

Cheers, and thanks for this great distro .

(Have to go back to MS tech-ed sessions and "cloud computing")