The DIY Guide to Atom

ONE OF THE VIRTUES OF THE ATOM is that it’s sparking new interest in the DIY crowd, eager to get in on the embedded/ultra low profile technology. Extremetech gives us a guided tour to the DIY world of Atom. You can buy an off the shelf Atom kit, the D945GCLF, for a pittance (about $65) and that’ll get you the mini-ITX format board and the CPU itself. The rest looks like a shopping list from mini-itx.com a personal fave of ours when it comes to buying low profile components. The 945GCLF has some drawbacks compared to more mature integration solutions: no DVI or HDMI, one single slot, no PCIe slots and just 100Mbps Ethernet (as opposed to Gigabit). It’s a nice “appliance” but not much else. Read the article here.

OCW has an “exclusive” look at ECS’ 9500GT. The card is set to replace the 8600GT but lucky for everyone, performance is comparable to a GTS. If you’re still stuck in low-res 1024x768 or 1280x1024 gaming, this might present an affordable solution. It does SLI, although we don’t think that’ll be your first choice, but it’s low-powered enough not to require extra PCIe power. $100 will buy you one. Get it here.

Overclockers Club reviewed the Palit GTX 280 on Monday (sorry guys). The Palit is a pretty reference GTX 280, but OCC managed to squeeze 126MHz extra out of the core, putting it above and beyond the call of duty. You’ll also be able to peruse the details here, and you’ll notice that OCC included transcoding, Folding@Home and CUDA numbers as well. Lots of potential, it seems, for the big little GPU.

Trusted Reviews is going local and reviewing the Advent 4211 Netbook. Advent is a MSI Wind that’s being rebranded and pitched by PC World stores in the UK. Ardjuna finds that, aesthetics aside, the Wind is a pricier deal (by about £50) than the advent. The Advent logo looks neater than the Wind, and the case itself is *not white*. Good stuff if you need this sort of typewriter, errr, laptop. Read this one, here.

Hot Hardware is also doing its Nano vs. Atom face-off today. The Nano L2100 is clocked at 1.8GHz, whilst the Atom is a slower 1.6GHz – but that’s academic, as the Atom has HT tech that will let you slip a second thread in the processing queue. What we’re seeing here is that the Atom platform is a lot more nailed down than the Nano, where you can stick in a PCIe graphics card for the heck of it. Anyway, VIA should stick Nanos in as many laptop designs as possible, as soon as it can, and maybe they can take advantage of Intel’s own marketing (much like AMD did in the past). Read Marco’s stuff here.

Frosty Tech is reviewing Asus’ Lion Square CPU cooler. The design is one we’ve talked about a while back, but review-wise we haven’t seen many on this one. Everyone’s loss, as the Lion Square seems to rate as a pretty decent cooler. It’s got a mag-lev fan (extra silent) and it actually sits in the middle of the cooling fins. The Lion Square is pricey, costing about $60. We have to say this, though: the Asus Lion Square heatsink is a sight for sore eyes. That’s one cool design.

CPU3D received a Yoyotech (no, seriously) Intel Nova XT gaming system for review. It’s what they call “one of the most attractively priced, ready-built gaming systems available online”. Well, we guess you’ll be the judge of that. From what we see, it’s well equipped and some work went into the assembly. It’s clutter-free, which is quite an achievement these days. You get a Q9300, HD 4870, 4GB of ReaperX DDR2-1066 RAM in an Antec Twelve-Hundred case. Take a look. µ