Atom Benchmarked: 4W Of Performance

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ITX Motherboard

The 945GCT-D is 7.9” x 6.7” (20 cm x 17 cm), which is slightly longer than a traditional 6.7” x 6.7” (17 cm x 17 cm) mini-ITX board. The additional length is necessary to accommodate the second memory slot, the PCI Express x1 slot, and some audio connections that other ITX boards do not have.

Technical Data of the ECS 945GCT-D Board
Component Details
Video 1x VGA
Drives 2x SATA300, 1x IDE ATA100
USB 2x USB 2.0 (IO Cover) 4x USB 2.0 (Onboard)
Serial 1x COM
PS2 Mouse, Keyboard
Plug-in Cards 1x PCI 33, 1x PCIe x1
Network 1x 100 Mbit (Atheros L2 Fast)
Audio VIA VT1708B (5.1 Channel)
Fan Connections 2x 3-pin
Dimensions 20 cm x 17 cm
ATX 24-pin ATX

The board does not have connections for a floppy drive or parallel port.

Graphics core - Intel GMA950

There is only one VGA connection available for screen output. Working with a screen resolution of 1280x1024 is possible, but compared to a traditional graphics card, it is a little blurred. At 1920x1200, the screen is washed-out and it is no longer practical to try to use on a daily basis. The 945G chip set with the GMA950 graphics core is a little outdated as well. Technically speaking, a DVI-D interface is available through the core logic, but ECS has not provided one on this board.

The GMA950 graphics core supports the Vista Aero interface and provides DirectX 9 support. It is not suitable for gaming, though. And under Vista, the windows are a little slow to redraw when they are moved. The onboard graphics core can be assigned 8 MB, 64 MB or 128 MB of memory.

Previous Next
Summary
  1. Intel Atom 230 At 1.60 GHz With Hyper-Threading
  2. Overview Of Atom Technology
  3. Functional Comparison Of The Atom
  4. ITX Motherboard
  5. ITX Motherboard, Continued
  6. BIOS And Overclocking
  7. Thermal Power Loss
  8. Thermal Power Loss, Continued
  9. Cooling And Temperatures
  10. Speed When Surfing
  11. Windows XP Or Vista?
  12. LAN, DVD And HD-Speed
  13. Hyper-Threading: Atom 230 Versus Celeron 220
  14. Test System, Drivers, Benchmarks, Settings
  15. Lame, iTunes, AVG, Winrar
  16. Cinema 4D, Fritz, PCMark
  17. SiSoft Sandra
  18. Results: Atom Is Not Suitable As An Office PC
About the author
Bert Toepelt
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49 comments
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  • Anonymous
    Where's Linux tests?.
  • randomizer
    This saved me time researching for an assignment :)
  • jaragon13
    Shouldn't it be on 9 - cooling and temperatures,be idle and load,instead of idle and idle? >.
  • Anonymous
    When you look at the power consumption on load and compare it to the slowness of the chip while performing on load, it becomes clear why it only uses 4 watts more...
  • Anonymous
    A CPU without a platform is useless.
    Analyzing the Atom platform quickly from the power/performance perspective.
    CPU name / idle W / load W/ Lame (seconds) / total Lame W used
    Atom 230 / 40.5 W / 44.2 W / 773 s / 9.49 W
    Celeron 220 / 44.9 W / 55.4 W / 375 s / 5.77 W
    E2140 / 58.5 W / 69.5 W / 271 s / 5.23 W

    Clearly the Atom platform is the most inefficient power/performance wise.
    At idle you might win some W, but as soon as you try to do something you spend more power and waste more time.
    There are other things you should consider, the frustration of having to wait for things that now we are used to do near instant and the inability to play HD video or use any significant graphics.

    The only thing positive for atom is it's price. It's cheap. And maybe with a new chipset it might even be power efficient. But for now it's just cheap.
  • neiroatopelcc
    I wonder if it'd be able to play games if one were to equip it with a pci based 2400pro & 4gb of memory?
    Also, I wouldn't be surprised if someone invents a voltmod for those boards, so they can increase voltage for cpu, mch & ich enabling 2ghz+ speeds
  • nachowarrior
    so in other words atom is pretty much a failure unless it's pumped into a tablet or umpc? and even then apparently isn't cost effective or readily available, nice...sounds like a great product launch.
  • Anonymous
    I ran a google search for ECS 945GCT-D mainboard, and could not find it.
    I don't get it, why do you publish tests with products that don't even exist on the vendor web site?

    Thank you, anyway
  • Lans
    Raiden, while your numbers are true, I think a fairer comparison would be to use 773s for all processors (meaning the rest go to idle alot quicker). I suppose you can power your computer down afterwards or start up a web browser etc.

    Atom 230 (773s load / 0s idle) : 9.5W
    Celeron 220 (375s load / 398s idle): 10.7W
    E2140 (271s load / 502s idle): 13.4W
    Sempron LE-1100 (43.9W idle, 70.4W load, 301s load / 472s idle): 11.6W

    Sure this is biased against the Atom (not going idle at all) but with 4W delta between load and idle, I am too lazy to change the numbers already used.

    I find it comparing the Atom to a Sempron LE-1100 more and Celeron 220 interesting:

    "A Celeron at 1.20 GHz is 35% faster than an Atom at 1.60 GHz, but the Atom only consumes a fraction of the energy used by the Celeron. The AMD Sempron system, which uses almost the same energy in idle mode as the Atom system, is 43% faster."
  • haley0918
    in anyway, despite of the low power and low performance, i still think it'll also be good as simple file server or home server besides as umpc. for experts, it'll be enough for some robotics and control application. just like the one used for Aiko in http://www.projectaiko.com
  • knickle
    I've seen several articles on the Atom, but I have yet to see Tom's actually do a product comparison with a true Mini-ITX competitor, like Via. Is this because Via won't provide the hardware?
  • cmateski
    It would be interesting to see how to reduce power use by the 945GC when in a "headless" system e.g. firewall. I'd love to see how well this board performs with Endian Firewall or PFsense. Especially with all the Unified Threat Management (UTM) features running.
  • belrik
    What about VIA's EPIA series? They have been around for ages and utilise less power than this, plus they have DVD and HD acceleration onboard. They are frequently run in cars and off batteries so they must have pretty low power requirements. They even released a dual-core one a while ago, surely this would kick atom's butt? (the DP-310 which has been out for years now).
    Why not compare this like-for-like, surely you are aware of the VIA platforms and they are widely available with speeds up to 2GHz now. What's more VIA have announced that they will be providing boards with PCI-E x16 for proper graphics cards, giving them the edge over Atom which has been crippled to stop it affecting sales of Intel's more powerful and expensive products.

    All this coverage of Atom would be far more balanced journalism if you compared it to a contender in it's own arena rather than more fully-featured desktop boards intended for a different market. I'd suggest you look at some of the Jetway boards for instance.

    A long-time regular reader of Tomshardware
  • TeraMedia
    Please elaborate on this:
    Quote:
    Working with a screen resolution of 1280x1024 is possible, but compared to a traditional graphics card, it is a little blurred. At 1920x1200, the screen is washed-out and it is no longer practical to try to use on a daily basis.
    I use a VGA connection to a 1920x1200 LCD panel all day long (through a KVM switch, no-less). It doesn't look washed out and it is completely usable on a daily basis. And how would an LCD panel look "blurred"? The pixels don't move, don't shift, and don't require focus? Are you using a CRT, and that is exhibiting timing issues with the VGA output that are not visible with a higher-quality VGA output driver chip? I just can't make sense out of your statements about video output.
  • clownbaby
    Why isn't it compared to the mini-ITX offerings from VIA. Comparing it to full powered desktops is like comparing a bicycle to a motorcycle.
  • Anonymous
    Seems like it's performance is comparable to an Athlon XP 2400 or so. I don't see how that's not acceptable for office use. Our whole site had PIIIs running XP up until 2005.
  • Anonymous
    I don't understand why Intel chose to have an elongated rectangular shaped die. Common sense dictates that the die be as square shaped as possible to minimize the surface area to pack more dies per wafer.
  • caamsa
    Looks like Intell looses to VIA. (Atom VS Nano)

    http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTUzNSwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==
  • Anonymous
    I know that these Taiwanese manufacturers have enthusiastically popped the Atom into these boards - but pitting a CPU designed to go after Transmeta, ARM, AMD Geode and VIA C7 type processors was aptly put as "pitting a bicycle against a motorcycle." This processor simply wasn't designed to compete in the desktop segment.
  • neblogai
    tennisballg: "Seems like it's performance is comparable to an Athlon XP 2400 or so. I don't see how that's not acceptable for office use. Our whole site had PIIIs running XP up until 2005."

    Surely not Athlon XP 2400, but something twice slower, like Pentium 4 1,4GHz, or an Athlon 1 GHz. And same as Celeron M at 900Mhz which is used in EEE PC subnotebooks.
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