AOpen I915Gmm-HFS
AOpen's i915GMm-HFS is built around a mobile chipset.
In a recent article, we demonstrated the performance of which the Pentium M is capable. The only ingredient missing to build a quiet and energy-efficient system, then, is a suitable motherboard. Fortunately, AOpen builds just such a board.
The slightly cryptic name i915GMm-HFS designates a compact microATX board that differentiates itself from its competitors by the chipset it uses: the board is built around Intel's mobile i915GM chipset. Originally developed for notebooks, it comes with lower power requirements and, as a tribute to this, a trimmed feature set.
The motherboard supports both Intel's Pentium M and the Celeron M. So far, these chips have only been used in notebooks - not especially surprising, considering that they were designed as low-power parts. Thus, AOpen is taking a new and, so far, novel approach that looks to hold a lot of potential.
This product is actually the second-generation Pentium M desktop offering. Its predecessor, the i855GMEm-LFS, was based on the i855 chipset. As such, it was limited to FSB400 and only offered an AGP interface. The new model, on the other hand, offers both PCIe and FSB533.
