Gigabyte GA-GC230D Atom Mini-ITX

I find it funny that the north bridge needs active cooling and the actual cpu doesnt, seems ironic =p

Why 120W? I'm under the impression that 90W should be sufficient, at least that's what several vendors are recommending.

120W is a round number, 90W would do - it's all 12V dependent really, not wattage.

Does anyone else see consoles in the future being just computers with mainstream mods for enclosures? They are just that as of now, but I more mean like Voodoo or the Blackbird for the masses.

ITX-form factor
1 PCI-E 2.0 instead of 1 pci slot
2 DDR2 any speed, supporting 8gb's
2 SATA (SSD, velociraptor, or conventional 1tb)
1 AMD or Intel cpu

I really think AMD could produce this item above with no effort if a market was real for this kind of system. Having the chipsets, processors, video cards, and whole sale manufacturers already. it would be easy to create a computer console. stick a slim blu-ray player/burner as in a laptop on a mini-itx enclosure with a media card reader and you have something very special indeed...

I have really inspected this review after the thrashing Bit-tech just got from the AnAndtech forums- great review. I love Bit-tech and the blue collar nerd approach.

I just bought the Intel Atom board last month for RM250 (around 41 pounds). The difference that I can see with the Gigabyte one is that there's no heatsink on the southbridge.
It replaces my old (but trusty) Epox Pentium 3 board, so the Atom's much faster. Mind you I only use it for playing emulator games (mostly PSOne). I'm happy with it, though I would wish that it comes with either a AGP or PCI Express slot (AGP cards are still widely available here).
Cheap and cheerful in my opinion.

Reason I was bit.. loud in my post is, I'm looking refer a low wattage system to a friend off the grid. I was blown away that his Acer pulls less power than a modern mobo, with a modern low power CPU at idle.

btw I was surprised the PSU in the Acer T180 is a Fortron Source 250 watt. I'm glad to see such a quality PSU in a cheap system.

I've wanted a tiny, silent, NAS box that I could also use for occasionally downloads or general use for quite a while... I finally built it when I could get my hands on this board.

It's happily running Ubuntu, serving my network and gives me a landing pad into my network when I'm away from home... using it as a NAS is really secondary.

Shame about the North Bridge being a bit power hungry compared to the Atom.

Originally Posted by ARM
I just bought the Intel Atom board last month for RM250 (around 41 pounds). The difference that I can see with the Gigabyte one is that there's no heatsink on the southbridge.
It replaces my old (but trusty) Epox Pentium 3 board, so the Atom's much faster. Mind you I only use it for playing emulator games (mostly PSOne). I'm happy with it, though I would wish that it comes with either a AGP or PCI Express slot (AGP cards are still widely available here).
Cheap and cheerful in my opinion.

The Gigabyte one uses better quality components, such as all solid capacitors... apparently Intel are being really strict on what vendors put out for Atom boards, so they are all almost identical.

Originally Posted by The Infamous Mr D
The Atom is certainly an impressive design, but this is let down by the ancient chipset with its whopping TDP, lack of video support, networking and expansion options. With the majority of the features catered for by USB and onboard options, a PCI slot seems redundant - a PCI-Express x16 slot would have been a real boon for the enthusiast market.

I'm probably going to sit and wait for Mini-ITX v2.0.

I don't agree. I think a PCI-e slot would've pushed up the price and been even more redundant than a standard PCI slot, comparatively. You're not going to be using a dedicated graphics card in this system, it's just not realistic, there would be huge bottlenecks all over the place.

I imagine the PCI slot would be used by an enthusiast level sound card or a TV tuner, though that's just my opinion.

Might pick this one up for a all in one Carputer..

Originally Posted by evanbraakensiek
I don't agree. I think a PCI-e slot would've pushed up the price and been even more redundant than a standard PCI slot, comparatively. You're not going to be using a dedicated graphics card in this system, it's just not realistic, there would be huge bottlenecks all over the place.

I imagine the PCI slot would be used by an enthusiast level sound card or a TV tuner, though that's just my opinion.

It's simpler than that - Intel doesn't want it to affect its Celeron and other chipset sales.

Does anyone know the overall height of the board?