This little thing gained may attention, mostly because of its cheap price. I'm thinking of planting it in a some kind of a tunnel-like case with with a standard Nexus 350 ATX PSU (mainly because I happen to have one) creating a flow of air though it. A couple of questions (hopefully I didn't miss them already answered)

1. Linux. Alright, the GPU seems to be a PITA but I was going to run it headless anyway, so does everything else work flawlessy and with open source drivers? Ethernet? SATA? Can you read temperature with lmsensors?

2. The running temps sound ridiculous to me. 80 degrees? But with 19W TDP this means that the CPU is not generating very much heat, it only has serious trouble getting rid of it, am I right? So the are coming through the whole case will be reasonably cool and will not destroy the PSU in the long run?

3. Some you seem to have installed dual Thermalright or NC-U6 heatsinks. Who hot the North Bridge can actually get? Can't you just install the original CPU heatsink on the NB and high-tech heatpipe wonder on the CPU?

Some nice background info and links can be found in -- "Developers wanted, or: the state of accelerated video on Linux" at http://wolfgang.lonien.de/?p=612

USB - yes
SATA - yes
Ethernet - yes (tried on ubuntu 8.4 beta only, but 7.10 dmesg says:
eth0: SiS 900 PCI Fast Ethernet at 0x2000, IRQ 20, 00:1c:c0:2b:8f:0f.
GPU - use 'vesa' drivers and you'll be fine for a headless machine.

lmsensors - yes! (ubuntu 7.10)
The module needs to be started, e.g. by adding them to /etc/modules
# Generated by sensors-detect on Thu Feb 21 22:47:38 2008
# Chip drivers
w83627ehf




As you say, it does not produce that much heat. Problem is that the heatsinks alone are not sufficient without airflow. If you read the forums, most people find some sort of a sollution to make the system run cooler. Fan blowing across, underclocking, larger heatsinks, heatpipes, etc. I personally worry more about the (N/S) bridge than the CPU or the PSU.



Hot? If my CPU sensor says 45deg, system 38 deg, I cannot keep my fingers on the bridge. (btw, I have a silent fan@~7V blowing across the MB from behind the CPU.). For heatsinks and such, please measure that first, there is not so much space available and there is only a tiny sort of clip to attach to the MB.

In my system, the stock CPU heatsink won't fit on the NB (it hits the RAM socket and interferes with the CPU heatsink), so I put a Thermalright HR-05 on the CPU and the stock NB heatsink from my i975Xa-YDG (sans fan) on the D201GLY2 northbridge. That seems to tame the heat fairly well with moderate airflow.

However, since this is in a racked 4U chassis in a garage, I've gone with more fans (120mm + 2x80mm) in order to keep it cool when it gets up to 100 degrees F in the summertime.

-D

Ok, so I got some G.SKILL DDR2 533 from newegg, works great. Solved that problem.

So far the board works pretty good. I don't have it in a case (test system), and so far just setting a 90mm fan on top of the cpu heatsink and blowing over the chipset heatsink works fine with the temps. I haven't installed lmsensors, but the heatsinks are cool to the touch, so I'll deal with it later.

I did find a site ( http://www.alphanovatech.com/ )that sells heatsinks that some of you might be interested in if you hadn't seen it before. Not sure on pricing, but they shouldn't be too much.

I just got to playing around with video on it. vesa works fine, the drivers from intels site work fine too, although I just tried them, no experience yet. All I did was place the sis_drv.so file in /usr/lib/xorg/drivers/ . Video works fine, although fullscreen was still kind of choppy, but that was only testing with mythtv, so it might be some options there I need to tweak.

Oh, and boot time is really quick, around 15-20 seconds.

I installed a Zalman cooler on my D201GLY2 NB. Fits on the mobo tight with Intels spring clip. It is only a mm or two taller than stock CPU cooler, so should fit most cases. Very reasonable priced at only four bucks: http://www.svc.com/zanoco.html
Provides very good cooling. Even video processing and 100% cpu workload doesn't raise the temps higher than 49C for either the cpu or NB. The case is almost silent with the single 80mm Nexus ramped down to 9V. Pencilmod is working good at about 1.18V. Any lower and extreme workloading will fail sometimes.

should i proceed with VID,
should i connect 5+3 on the cpu socket or 5+6 on VRM regulator



i tried pencil the ofs resisor but coudn't get lower than 1.288 wich resulted 1W drop form the original 40.0W/1.328V with my fortron. so im desperate.

I got some questions via PM regarding the case I've got for my D201GLY2 and will reply here so all might benifit from the answers.

1. Do you think a second 3.5" drive would fit in the optical drive cage?
-> I think it's going to be a bit hard to fit a 3.5" in the optical cage, but I am unsure, I'll open the case and check for you.

2. Why did you swap the included PSU for a PicoPSU?
-> You can get the Noah case with and without a standard PSU, and I opted for without, which looking back was perhaps a waste of money.

3. If I wanted to swap the heatsink on the CPU how tall can the new heatsink be and still fit in the case?
-> Again I'll have to check for you, but it's quite tall and the standard heatsink on the CPU fits in there with no problems at all - So at least as big as the standard stock heatsink.

Has anyone installed win 7?Which drivers did you use?Where did you get them?
Thanks