Intel DG45FC: Loaded LGA775 Mini-ITX Board
Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 10:02 pm
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I'm about to try with a Morex Venus 669 which hopefully should arrive over the weekend. Possibly not the best solution out of the box, and I haven't heard too much in the way of customisation.Ender17 wrote:recommendations for a ITX case?
Maybe later in the week if I have time.Interesting review thanks, any chance of a picture with the CPU cooler installed to give a sense of scale?
SpeedStep works of course. If it didn't, you would read our complaints on the last page and it would show in the Pro/Con table.[/quote]I saw no mention of speedstep in the review (I could have missed it). When you say "The stock settings were used as the board is incapable of underclocking or undervolting" does this mean that speedstep is unsupported or just refer to bios adjustments?
If we had one, we would've tried it.It would be interesting to see video decoding performance and power consumption with a 1.6ghz E2140 (or similar), I am sure many people would consider pairing such a processor with this board.
I don't see that aspect unless you're saying intel's E7200 and E5200 are more power hungry. The E5200 is only $84 and I bet it's one of the most power efficient in the line. Personally i'll take intel's combination of power and performance any day unless amd comes up with a nice miracle.MoJo wrote:
I think AMD is still king of lower power, because unlike Intel their cheapest stuff is also the lowest power stuff. You don't have to pay extra for power "saving", meaning that it is a real saving and not just a feel-good factor.
A fancy new HTPC for a standard def cathode ray tube TV will be an unusual combination. But the DVI connector is DVI-I so you can adapt it to VGA if you really want.MoJo wrote:Two things come to mind about this board. Why no s-video or RGB component output? I know it's all HDTV these days, but some of us still have standard def TVs... Even with just VGA, you can make an adapter.
Maybe you are looking at the wrong table. The first table used an old 65nm processor. The second used an E7200 processor and idle power was pretty much the same as the low power AMD. The low end desktop intel processor (celerons aside) is now the E5200: low power, cheap, comparable to the higher end of AMD dual cores.The other thing is the price of the board and a CPU. The AMD system beats it for idle power consumption, which is going to be the most common state in a media centre/NAS/desktop.
I think AMD is still king of lower power, because unlike Intel their cheapest stuff is also the lowest power stuff. You don't have to pay extra for power "saving", meaning that it is a real saving and not just a feel-good factor.
I think you are missing the point. The extra money you spend on an Intel set-up (don't forget the board is a lot more expensive too - £75-80 compared to £30 for an AM2 board assuming you don't care about mini-ITX) would take years to recoup with a 10W load power saving. Most systems are idle 90% of the time anyway, so you would probably never recoup the extra cost.merlin wrote:I don't see that aspect unless you're saying intel's E7200 and E5200 are more power hungry. The E5200 is only $84 and I bet it's one of the most power efficient in the line. Personally i'll take intel's combination of power and performance any day unless amd comes up with a nice miracle.
I'm not missing the point at all. Intel is not much more expensive and much better on the performance side. Also around here, I can get a cpu + motherboard for the cost of just a cpu pretty regularly. Not the best motherboard, but neither is a bargain basement amd board. Also at least in my case...cost doesn't really matter. Quality matters. I could easily spend $2000 without caring, but I won't because I'm cheap and we can get great stuff for bargain prices. And I happen to like my $500 intel microatx system just fine and it's quite a bit better than the AM2.MoJo wrote:I think you are missing the point. The extra money you spend on an Intel set-up (don't forget the board is a lot more expensive too - £75-80 compared to £30 for an AM2 board assuming you don't care about mini-ITX) would take years to recoup with a 10W load power saving. Most systems are idle 90% of the time anyway, so you would probably never recoup the extra cost.merlin wrote:I don't see that aspect unless you're saying intel's E7200 and E5200 are more power hungry. The E5200 is only $84 and I bet it's one of the most power efficient in the line. Personally i'll take intel's combination of power and performance any day unless amd comes up with a nice miracle.
Performance wise as long as you can play all high-def stuff then AMD chips are fine for media centre, NAS and desktop use.
The situation is different if you need mini-ITX, but I really can't see the point of this form factor unless you have money to burn. You can get really nice media centre style micro-ATX cases/PSUs with better/quieter cooling for a lot less than ITX cases/PSUs. For NAS or desktop, micro-ATX gives you much more room for HDDs too.
That's why I say AMD is still king. Unless you desparately need a very small form factor and are willing to spend a lot of money to keep it cool and quiet, a super cheap AM2 micro-ATX system is always the best option from a price/performance/cost of ownership point of view.
Not everyone can. Most people, in fact, couldn't or shouldn't.merlin wrote:I'm not missing the point at all. Intel is not much more expensive and much better on the performance side. Also around here, I can get a cpu + motherboard for the cost of just a cpu pretty regularly. Not the best motherboard, but neither is a bargain basement amd board. Also at least in my case...cost doesn't really matter. Quality matters. I could easily spend $2000 without caring, but I won't because I'm cheap and we can get great stuff for bargain prices. And I happen to like my $500 intel microatx system just fine and it's quite a bit better than the AM2.
Plenty of people either are, or don't want to spend it for no benefit, to them. Most people use computers for office-style work and web browsing. Are you going to tell me an Intel solution is appreciably better for than than an AMD because of its performance?merlin wrote:Anyways the whole point here is about mini-itx. An intel setup is not much more expensive and a decent amount more powerful. Also the power usage is pretty even. I'm not seeing any amd advantage unless you're too poor for a $50-100 difference.
I have this board with an E8400 and four (4x) 1TB WD Green Power and one 1TB Famsung F1, but no optical drives, running on a PICO PSU 120 without any problems at all. The PICO PSU is powered by a modded DELL 150W Brick, but ran fine with a 110W brick as well.I see it as potentially being able to drive this board with E8400 and 2 optical drives and a laptop hard drive. However, I'm a bit worried by the specs on the ac-dc i.e 84W max power and only 80% efficiency. Is the normal 120W Pico with 102W brick more likely to power this combo?
Actually for mini-itx, plenty of reasons. Quad sata ports. Stable chipset. Raid-5. Gigabite Ethernet. Hdmi/Dvi, Esata... Basically the board and the chips are both better. What is there to complain? The nice irony is I was a huge amd supporter until a couple years ago.Scrooge wrote:
Plenty of people either are, or don't want to spend it for no benefit, to them. Most people use computers for office-style work and web browsing. Are you going to tell me an Intel solution is appreciably better for than than an AMD because of its performance?
Actually, SPCR's current low power record holding mobo, the GA-MA74GM-S2, is also one of the cheapest available. It spec is excellent two - six SATA ports, gigabit ethernet, 16x PCI-e slot etc.merlin wrote:Not the best motherboard, but neither is a bargain basement amd board.
But what do you use it for? That's the key question. My point is that for most uses and most users, you can get a quality rock solid AM2 system for less with performance that is for most intents and purposes equal to an Intel system, which which is quite a bit cheaper.Also at least in my case...cost doesn't really matter. Quality matters. I could easily spend $2000 without caring, but I won't because I'm cheap and we can get great stuff for bargain prices. And I happen to like my $500 intel microatx system just fine and it's quite a bit better than the AM2.
I guess I'm too poor not to care about it thenAnyways the whole point here is about mini-itx. An intel setup is not much more expensive and a decent amount more powerful. Also the power usage is pretty even. I'm not seeing any amd advantage unless you're too poor for a $50-100 difference.
I'm not sure what's so surprising. All of Intel's non-Extreme dual-core processors are rated for a 65 W TDP, but testing bears out a wide variation in actual power consumption, even at load (especially given the supralinear relation between clock rate and power consumption—higher-clocked models in the same line can be expected to consume more power than lower-clocked ones).Surprisingly, despite the fact the E7200 and E6400 have the same 65W TDP rating, using the E7200 caused the power draw to drop by 14W at idle, 16-22W during video playback and 33W on full load.
Unlike the E7200 it lacks SSE4, which means that codecs that can use SSE4 for decoding will be affected significantly in comparison.A good alternative may be the recently released $85 Pentium Dual-Core E5200. It is also a Wolfdale processor but is clocked slightly slower at 2.5Ghz and is hampered further with less L2 cache and a slower front side bus; it's likely to perform similarly.
Intel uses its own new specification (well, new as in it's been around for longer than the past two years and used primarily on Intel motherboards only) called Quiet System Technology, or QST. They have not released the specs for this mechanism, which depends on the embedded Management Engine, which is itself barely documented. This means that SpeedFan is unlikely to support it any time soon.The current version of SpeedFan did not seem to support this board at all. Most of the readings were blank and no amount of tweaking allowed us to initiate manual fan control. Furthermore, Intel does not provide any officially supported monitoring programs.
QFTMr. Perfect wrote:Now if they'd only put a X16 slot on it...
Contrary to what most manufacturers seem to think, not all gamers want Quad Extremes with 8GB of DDR3 and GTX280 SLI, all overclocked to the bleeding edge. A discreet little mini-ITX box that could play modern games would be great.
Does it have to be mini-ITX, because there are loads of micro-ATX boards that fit that description and loads of nice micro-ATX cases to go with them. Considering you want to use a "good aftermarket cooler" that pretty much rules out ITX cases since hardly any (none?) have the clearance for anything SPCR considers good.Aris wrote:Mr. Perfect wrote:I agree COMPLETELY! Give me a small Mini-ITX board that supports a low power Core 2 Duo, some DDR2 800 ram and a PCI-e 16x slot and i'd be one happy camper. Oh and dont forget the standard CPU Heatsink mounting holes on the motherboard for a good aftermarket heatsink.
We are going in circles. I can notice performance differences. You cannot. That's why you don't care about the differenceMoJo wrote:
But what do you use it for? That's the key question. My point is that for most uses and most users, you can get a quality rock solid AM2 system for less with performance that is for most intents and purposes equal to an Intel system, which which is quite a bit cheaper.
MikeC wrote:It's great that a picoPSU with 60W brick (and others) can power all the systems with various CPUs people have mentioned. I would advise caution, however, with running any of these AC/DC transformers close to their rated power. As gammelgam mentioned, spinup power draw of HDDs and optical drives is not accurately measured by devices like the KillaWatt, which is best for relatively static loads. Over the long term, letting a low power AC/DC adapter regularly handle peaks to maximum rated power could result in failure, and PSU failures can take out many other components along the way. Give yourself a ~30% headroom over the maximum steady-state power draw. I know this is hard to do without actually having the PSU to measure, but you can make reasonable guesstimates on your system's DC power demand based on power data from our review.
Which is why i didnt ask for a micro-ATX board like that, because they already exist. I ask for what does not exist.MoJo wrote: Does it have to be mini-ITX, because there are loads of micro-ATX boards that fit that description and loads of nice micro-ATX cases to go with them.