I'm planning to install Windows 7 (32-bit).
I prefer the Intel CPU also because it has a lower TDP, so it's likely to have less issues running fanless.
Some user reports about gaming performance would help me making a final decision.

FYI, there are more powerful Atoms you can run fanless like a D2700.
For 3D I guess an Atom/ION (which some people have run fanless) would be better but I'm not sure they run any cooler than Zacates. At least the heat would be spread out among more chips.

Gaming performance will vary drastically with specific games and settings. When you've got an underpowered board with a weird GPU, specifics matter.

I'm not planning to run recent 3D games, just old stuff.

Could you try for me:
RetroArch + bsnes performance profile + this shader
?

I hope someone here is running Windows on their N2800 (I'm not).
Perhaps if you were to explain what to test (what's "bsnes performance profile" and so on), someone would run the test for you...

Another idea that is bumping into my mind now:
since this board has a PCIe x1 slot, it should be possible to add a discrete video card, right?
Though it will consume more than the rest of the hardware , it may be a good solution for gaming.
When not required, the discrete video card could be disabled.

Does anyone have graphics driver for win 7 x64?

Yes, it's possible.
However keep in mind the port is designed to supply 10W to the card. I don't know if you have any wiggle-room. That limits what card you can use. The weak CPU would limit you anyway.

If you want an Atom with dedicated graphics, look at ION boards.


There's no official drivers and I very much doubt anyone has some kind of unofficial driver.

They're available only with old D525 Atoms,
a dedicated video card seems the only way to go.
Which one would you suggest?

Not knowing how much wiggle room you have means I can't give good advice. I'm also not knowledgable about graphics cards.
But the obvious choice would seem to be the HD5450. I'm nor sure but I think there are fanless versions with the right connector. It's not really a gaming card and it's a bit dated but it'd be much better than the N2800's IGP in terms of software compatibility if nothing else. And compatibility matters a great deal if you want to be able to use a broad range of games and operating systems. I suspect the 3D performance would also be significantly better but because of driver issues I don't know what the N2800's 3D potential is really.
And I don't know for a fact that all versions of the HD5450 would be compatible with the DN2800MT. And I'm ont sure even Intel can tell you. But you could ask them...

I understand, most video cards require some space in the case.
Anyway i hope there will be no need for that.
To test gaming performance on Linux i might suggest to try:
- DOSBox emulator (this special built also has shaders support)
- OpenArena (to view the FPS counter, add "+set cg_drawFPS "1"" to the commandline)

Is there no Windows user here?

The problem with Linux is that performance is likely going to depend on the driver you use. The only official driver comes with MeeGo.
I'm using my DN2800MT as an out-of-the way headless server so I'd have to spend some time to install a GUI, disconnect the server to move it to a desk, connect it to a display and so on to test a game. If I'm going to do that, I don't want to do it for nothing. I'd need to know exactly what driver you want to test and exactly how to get a reproducible result... assuming you actually intend to run Linux (if you don't, only Windows users can help you, at least until Intel ships a Windows 8 driver and Microsoft ships a Windows 8 beta you can run off USB).

I understand your point, the Windows drivers are completely different from the Linux ones, and so performance will vary.
Anyway, i have a very-stripped version of Win7 that can boot from an usb pendrive (it really boots from RAM after copying itself from USB).

I don't suppose you've to a license to distribute your version. Copyright laws are in our way once again.
Is it a quick process to make a USB-bootable version from any FPP Win 7 media? If so, I could test a game with the official Win 7 drivers...

I've sent you a PM.

I've found this old 3dMark benchmark, but i'd really like to know this board performance with real games/emulators, like the ones i've mentioned in my previous posts.

It seems Windows drivers have improved considerably since then so I don't think this old benchmark is relevant.

I've tried installing a Geforce GT520 card on this DN2800MT board. Unfortunately it won't work.
VESA works, but the driver does not load, so no hardware acceleration.
I know the board only delivers 10watt on the PCIe port, but adding external power to the GT520 card does not help.
Am I running into power problems, of is there some sort of incompatibility between this board en some video cards?

Got this board installed with Mageia 2 RC and not much luck at all.

The lowest wattage so far as been 14W, but its averaging 15W. It DOES have a WiFi card in the full length mini PCIe slot which seems to get pretty hot itself, could draw up to 5W.

I also left "OS ACPI C3 Report" and "PCIe ASPM Support" disabled in the BIOS as I read there are major issues with the 82574L LAN chip and ASPM - it basically crashes under high load. Although so far, I can't get traffic to pass over the ethernet port at all. The graphics are also showing up corrupt, although I could live with that as this is going to be a router.

As for suggestion of running a discreet GPU on this board, not a chance. As understand it most cards expect to be able to draw 60W from the PCIe connector (with the slot usually capable of up to 75W) so this board being limited to 10W means its a none starter. Even the HD5450 is rated to draw up to double that number of watts at load, so while it "might" work in idle it would either crash or fry the board under load.

If you look at page 70 of the product guide its expected that the entire load of everything put together be only 87.9W. It also explicitly says on page 71 that you must NOT exceed 10W on the PCIe connector.

I'm surprised you were even able to get a graphics card to fit as doesn't the fact its a standard PCIe x1 slot prevent a x16 card going in due to the plastic? My previous Atom board the Asus AT5NM10T-I specifically had an open-ended PCIe slot to allow a graphics card to fit, presumably that is also capable of outputting the full wattage needed due to having the normal ATX PSU connectors.

Your brick could also be inefficient or your meter inaccurate.


I didn't notice any issues but then again I only briefly tested high load and I didn't test all types of high load.


This isn't what SPCR's tests found.
And being rated for 10W is not the same thing as a slightly larger draw causing crashes or frying (!) the board.

I did a little search for compatible videocards, and so far i've found:
- NVIDIA GeForce 7300 LE arccording to this bench max power usage is 10W -> not available as PCIex1?
- a few Matrox models (like the P690 Series) -> pricey and not suitable for gaming

I've also found a benchmark of GMA3650 (useful for comparison).

I did say it uses DOUBLE, that is far from "slightly more". Also as Intel are making a big deal in the manual about not going over that 10W, is it really worth the risk?

If lower power usage is the priority but you need basic gaming, then an i3 would make a lot more sense as it will likely idle at similar levels as this board will with a graphics card in it, but have a lot more grunt for light gaming than any card this board can support.

I'm so not having much luck with the built-in GPU. I wanted to try reinstalling Mageia as Ethernet doesn't want to work for some reason (Mageia was installed on this HDD using my old Atom) but its impossible to see what I'm doing with a picture like this:

Who cares? SPCR estimated the card they got uses less than 10W. Some cards with the same chipset may use more and some people may be making baseless claims.


I understand Mageia is bleeding edge. It's going to have issues (as documented on this forum). Simply use Debian, CentOS or some such.

In the picture it looks like you're using a TV, as opposed to a computer monitor. You might try using a monitor instead of a TV. I say this as I've heard Intel graphics chipsets aren't as robust as nvidia when it comes to EDID and some TVs. I've never experienced this myself, but I've heard people complain about it on the MythTV users mailing list. It's an easy test if you happen to have a monitor handy.

Nope its an LG 3D monitor and I tried HDMI and D-SUB, both the same.

Ethernet is working now, seems I'm having issues getting br0 to work properly. However I am getting weird ping spikes now:


A ping of 34.7ms certainly is not a good sign on Gigabit ethernet.

How frustrating as I switched to this board BECAUSE Intel ethernet controllers are highly regarded as reliable on Linux, yet I manage to find one with a dodgy chipset.

I think you may be right, Mageia is just not there yet despite it being the RC.

I got no such ping spikes. Maybe it's your target or your network.

Well I found my bridge problem at least, it was my fault of course - completely missed the "BRIDGE=br0" in the network config for the card, lol.

As for my ping issue, every other device on the network gets perfectly normal pings, its only that one card that shows problems.

Anyway, I now have a PCIe card with the same chipset. The plan being to use it for the WAN side as I'm temporarily using a USB ethernet adapter until I can get the IO shield and riser card.

So I guess I can test that, see if it shows the same behaviour, panic if it does. There HAS to be a way to get this chipset to play nice with Linux, its featured on many server boards. Its just so frustrating as one reason to use this board was because I was having reliability issues with the Realtek card on my Atom D525 board. What is it with Linux and ethernet problems lately? Last time I had issues like this was with a 3COM 10-BASE-T card, many moons ago.

The card alone is not at issue. It's a system issue. You're a bit rash to blame the card considering that others have stable pings and that you're having trouble with other hardware:

I've got no ping spikes or other issues on the Realtek NICs I've used on small Linux servers. And I don't recall having issues with the old 3COM cards either, although I might not have used them with Linux.

I've found a workaround for the 10W PCIe limit:
use an eGPU (external video card)
A bit cumbersome, but doable.

EDIT: a better solution could be using a video card powered entirely via a MOLEX cable, instead of the PCIe connector.
This also should be doable because you can power the board using an external PSU, thus avoiding the power limits.
(see this discussion)

EDIT2: the final solution (i really hope this works!)

I underclocked/undervolted my nvidia GT520 card (using a nvidia bios editor). Now it uses less than 10 watts under load. Still it doesn't work on the DN2800MT, the nvidia driver won't load. I think there might be some incompatiblity.

I received the following email from a reader of my DN2800MT review, I thought since it contains useful info I might post it here. Please be aware I have not tried what suggested in the email since my DN2800MT is currently in use as a headless server, so I don't know if it works as described!

Well, I have tried Mageia 2, Ubuntu 12.04, Mandriva 2011 and Fedora 17 and only Mandriva was immune to the problem and ONLY on its original 2.6.38 kernel, it developed the problem too when it updated to 2.6.39.
Strangely, I also added a second LAN adapter using the identical chipset into the PCIe x1 slot, that DOESN'T suffer the problem at all. I wonder what the difference is between the on-board implementation and the PCIe one?

Fortunately someone else with the same problem found a temporary fix, so I am using that for now to get round the problem.

I have settled on Fedora 17 64bit for now as it appears the most responsive on this board so far (once I turned off SELinux, was very laggy before that). Very pleased to see ttcp able to max out the Gigabit Ethernet using relatively little CPU load. Now to actually do something useful with it.

Incidentally, the Realtek NIC issue I was having on the previous Atom board is also well documented. It basically would only bring up the link once at boot and if it lost the link for whatever reason such as rebooting the router it was connected to, you had to power cycle the machine to get it back. I believe the problem may be finally fixed now in the 3.2.x/3.4.x kernels which are common to the latest distro releases.

Another interesting thing about my experiments with this board is I see very little difference in power consumption between idle and load, its literally a watt or two. Perhaps the PSU I am using sucks as I have never seen it drop below 14W, yet it also doesn't seem to have climbed since I added the second NIC, which would seem to concur that its PSU losses. Once I can finally get the M350 bracket for the board I will order a better PSU at the same time, hopefully get those watts down a little.