Intel D510M0 Motherboard: Atom 2.0

TEST RESULTS

System Power Draw

The D510M0 and Morex T3500 combination used a lot less power than the D945GCLF2 residing in the HFX Micro S13, between 25% and 30% both idle and on load. The T3500's PSU and DC adapter are very similar to that of the picoPSU used in the HFX system, and even if their respective efficiencies are off by a couple of percentage points, the difference in power draw would still be significant. The D510M0 + T3500 configuration also edges out the ION based EeeBox EB1501, though it is a much smaller machine that possibly uses mobile hardware.

The top exterior of the case got warm during testing, as did the large heatsink on the motherboard. However, it wasn't hot enough to be a concern — it past the touch-test with flying colors at least.

Video Playback

Without video hardware acceleration, video playback was similar to the Atom 330 and GMA 950 combination found in the D945GCLF2. In any event, most of the clips in our test suite played fine through CPU power alone, with the exception of the WMV-HD clip which so far has failed to render properly on any non-ION Atom system. Smooth x264 playback, even in 1080p, can be achieved using CoreAVC as a software decoder and 720p Flash video is no problem for the D510. There was about a 25% improvement in power consumption during video playback compared to the D945GCLF2.

Performance

On our timed benchmarks, the new Atom board only managed to improve upon its predecessor by 133 seconds total for a 3.4% overall improvement. Incidentally, the D510, thanks to its higher bus speed, runs at 1.66GHz versus the Atom 330's 1.60GHz — that's an increase of about 4%. Unfortunately it doesn't look like the changes in architecture have made performance any better, clock per clock. There might be a bottleneck somewhere in the design that hasn't been addressed.

GMA 3150 did push the D510MO's 3DMark05 score 40% higher than the D945GCLF2, but the difference is only significant in relative, not absolute terms. It doesn't come close to performing as well as ION, or even Intel's GMA 4500.

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