The Next Generation of Cool: AOpen's 37 Watt Pentium M Desktop PC

AOpen I915Gmm-HFS

AOpen's i915GMm-HFS is built around a mobile chipset.

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.

Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.