Even if you did put a sick graphics card in, surely the Atom would be a huge bottleneck?

Can this board take advantage of the GPU like the ION chipset does? Sure the graphics are better, but ION is great because things like HD video decoding are actually accelerated by the GPU. Will this board be able to do the same thing? Or will it rely on the CPU for things like HD video decoding?

Exactly. This is just stupid.

You could always add a cheap 8600GT and be done with it , you could watch whatever you wanted then. but then again... the atom processor might go up in speeds so then you would no longer have a bottle neck.

A sick graphics card? No, just a decent one is needed.

This is not designed to run games in high-res.
I'd love to have one such board, for HTPC. The ION is not doing so great in HD, and with this board you've got your options for a GPU accelerated HD playback.

On a second thought, perhaps there are better options, such as this one:http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Products/ProductsDetail.aspx?CategoryID=1&TypeID=37&DetailID=676&DetailName=Feature&MenuID=1&LanID=0

And another thing, other sites say that this board uses a single-core Atom, go google it.

You could also use the two pcie slots for RAID controllers and make that a really decent NAS.

kinda good for fanless built..even with a passive cooled decent graphic card

Is the Atom socket upgradeable when next gen comes out? seems like it is always "fused" in below a heat sink...

haha i want to see this with a GTX295!

The best use in this case would be to put in a dual dvi graphics card for office use. Stock traders would love it...if they have any customers left

Anyone remember the benchmarks Tom's did with the ION, the 9400 causes the atom to be the bottleneck, anything more it's going to benefit much.

My 2.8GHz dual core Pentium D bottlenecks a ATI 4670 massively... what the hell would the Atom be like?

Good idea and all, but the Atom is still a piece of junky old tech. Selling people slower computers is not innovation even if it is more efficient.

I honestly don't see why nettops/netbooks even cost so much in the first place. At the same price, I'd rather buy an old but superior laptop. It's worse than a 5 year old laptop in my house.




Ha. ha. ha...
NEXT SBM PLZ!

Am I the only who thinks that a GPU isn't the only thing that would plug into a pcie slot...

With a raid card in the pcie slot, this board would be perfect for a low power NAS/torrent box that can double as a net top.

Perhaps it would be interesting to see how the Atom DC performs with an ATI Radeon 4650 or so.

There are a few drawbacks, and that is that the pcie16x controller uses more energy than the intel GMA 940something chipset.
Also the price of such a setting is not really seen as 'price efficient' anymore.
The Atom DC actually performs like a 2Ghz processor for multi threaded applications, in which case a Radeon 3400/3600 or 4350 series will be probably overkill.
But seeing the price of the Radeon 4600 series one can hardly complain about it, and their power efficiency is pretty good too.

The DualCore Atom may have been a failure, primarily due to the chipset that intel ships with it. But if it had a 40nm chipset, and even faster memory controller, it could very easily break through the title of 'only HDTV capable setup'.

It's THE processor that should have been introduced when XP was introduced!

Depends on what videocard you plug into it. A modern ATI card does all the decoding as well.
These days gaming really depends on the graphics card. Sure a processor is important too, but a single core Atom uses 553Mhz RAM speeds, and the DC atom 667Mhz ramspeed. That's pretty ok! Then add, that the DC Atom actually uses 4 threads in Windows. So it's performance in multi threadded applications will outpace most 2Ghz single core/thread Pentium D's.

actually combining that with a high end hardware raid5 card (pcie4x/8x) and making it into a NAS might make it a powerful and efficient design - all the parity calculations are done through the hardware raid card, a sufficient efficient cpu for the OS, 2 slots for memory (~4gb) may see the best NAS created so far.

Pitty its ECS - dont trust that one bit for any important use....

And isnt this going against all specs Intel gave out (limits on the atom's use) ? I thought it was 1 ram slot max + onboard video (no pcie video slot - 16x)???

You can buy the atom cpus by themselves. Nvidia was on a whole warpath about the pricing of the chips a few weeks back.

well maybe a hd 4670 will be fine

I've used so many low-cost boards before (Asrock, ECS, Jetway and Biostar) so far the ECS boards are still working (K7AMA, K7VTA2), the Biostar boards died due to popped capacitors, the Asrock ones - well, all three suffered from the same defect - no power (K7VM3). The Jetway for socket 478 suffered from popped capacitors also.

Yes, its a poor performer than same chipset motherboards from other manufacturers, but so far they are very reliable, considering they are cheap.

it would b cool if u could overclock, then u can see how much bottleneck performance increases! and if u modify something like cooler master v10 u would probably be able to get a high overclock....

yeh I am after an Atom to install my Raid Controllers into for the Home Filer Server my Controllers support HDD power save features so having something Idling away for the week only using 20 watts would be wicked espeacailly with these SAS cards allowing over 200 HDD's installed in the array , any thign to cut down on the power bill

Yea, if the Atom cannot be overclocked at all then the highest i would go would be a 9800 GT....Anything else would bottleneck for sure....