Was walking around in Tokyo's main district for electronics, Akihabara, last night.

To my big suprise, some of shops had got posters with a "Coming Soon" stamp on them annoncing a new Pentium M motherboard from AOpen.

My Japanese is definately not up to scratch, but from what I could understad:

- retail price 29800 Japanese Yen.
- Mini-atx (could have been micro, I just don't remember)
- 2 SATA ports on a promise controller
- 2 PATA ports probably served from the Intel 855
- 3 PCI slots
- 1 AGP 4x slot
- Launch... September 2004.

This is nice news for the silent front. Finally one of the big vendors doing desktop pentium m mb's and at a significantly reduced price from all the alternatives.

I even bet that this is not lowest price AOpen can sell this for, I would assume that they are holding back a bit knowing that at the moment, they are already almost half the price of the competition.


Terje

-BUMP-

(for MikeC) -can you please contact AOpen to find out about this P-M board?

Did a quick search to see if I could find more. Found http://akiba.ascii24.com/akiba/news/200 ... 9-000.html

Run it through babelfish.altavista.com or www.worldlingo.com for a machine translation .

There are also to links to other articles on the card.

Terje

Looking at some of the vendors...

AOpen
Model: i855GMEm-LFS
Micro ATX
Socket 479

Now, if only the top of the line processor wasn't $600! 21W... can you passively cool that?

http://www.x86-secret.com/articles/cm/g ... txpm-9.htm

Its in french, so you might want to run it through babelfish.altavista.com

Now, 600MHZ might not be so usefull, but they run it up to full speed (1.7GHZ) fanless.

As for the cost of the 2GHz Pentium M...
Have a peek at the specmarks at http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/results/cpu2000.html

You will find this entry:
Dell Precision Mobile Workstation M60 (Pentium M 755) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 1528 1541 Text HTML PDF PS Config


The only machines able to beat this is a couple of P4 3.4GHZ EE.

Of course, this benchmark does not utilize multiprocessor technology so its not entirely fair against a HT enabled CPU in normal use, but still, I cannot ever remember before seing a laptop amongst the top performing machines on the CPU spechmarks.

I would say, yes, its expensive, but given the performance shown on the spec results, its actually not bad at all...

Found an internet store, buy it here! Dunno if they ship internationally though... can't read Japanese!
31000 Yen is something like 270 USD, a fair price for such an unusual (so far) product.

Found big pics here and here. It surely looks very interesting, and the best thing is that it looks like it has a standard P4 heatsink retention bracket!!!! That would be just sweet! Just add your favorite heatsink (no fan of course )!

Another good thing is that it looks quite much like any modern P4/A64 Aopen MB. It is black, it has similar color coding on internal ports and the typical white and blue AGP with the sliding lock. This indicates that it is made like most of their other consumer mobos, not some strange industrial product made by an unknown part of the company that doesn't care about looks.

So we got consumer price and looks and an internet store, but is this yet another strange PM mobo that won't go any further? I don't think so. Found some kind of japanese pricewatch, it seems like it is available in eight japanese stores! Prices from 29800 to 34000 Yen.

Edit: It got dual Gigabit LAN, I think I saw it somewhere else too.

So, $270 for the MB and $650 for the CPU... $920 and you can have PIV 3ghz+ performance at 21W.

Chris

Nobody ever claimed that the Bleeding Edge was cheap.

The official aopen.co.jp product page is here and the announcement here.

It didn't appeared in the other (glogal, eu, us) websites, altough in their "motherboard search" page, the i855GME chipset apears in a drop-down box.

The announcement is probably new for today. In the top left corner it says "2004â€

but it's still strange that they don't follow their naming convention.

The name should be something like MX7GM ...

wait 'n see.

Umh, now a 1.7 GHz centrino is about 270€ here ...

Anyone got any good recommendation for a very silent box to put this into?

I want it for home theater use primarily, so something that fits in with the rest of the equipment in dimentions (not a tower or a cube like machine) and that can house for instance an all in wonder card?

Guess that rules out boxes with only low profile PCI slots (or does any of the aiw cards come in a low profile version?)

Terje

Would be a nice combo with a Pentium M LV (10W TDP) for a silent (not quiet but really silent) workstation.

I believe the fastest Pentium LV runs 1.4 GHz, with a 1.5 GHz model out in a couple of months.

Especially combined with one of the upcoming external SATA-II solutions. Imaging maxing out this board with 2 GB of RAM, and using an external SATA 10K RPM Raptor in a separate quiet enclosure.

OTOH, a Intel 915/MCH6 variant of this board is propably already in the making...

Well, you got 3 options.
1. Accept a case with height to take full height PCI cards. Perhaps have a look at Antec Overture. This is a slightly cramped and good looking desktop case.

2. Find a graphics card you think is ok that is low profile. Perhaps have a look at Antec Minuet, but it is rumored to be very hard to cool silently.

3. Use a raiser card for the PCI. Ofcourse then you need a case for turned cards. Now the question is how many PCI cards you need (and you better be ok with a max of 2 cards...)

Unfortunately cooling a high end video card silently is often harder than cooling a CPU silently.

I hope this is released in the US market... Here's a setup:

2ghz (2.1 maybe soon) - 21W
5400 RPM 2.5" Samsung drive - 2.5W
ATI 9600 Non-pro - 8Wish
2-4gig of RAM - ??
Motherboard - ??

That's going to be a very quiet system. Perfectly quiet? No, but I can throw whatever DBs I'm working on into a RAM disk and just cruise.

I think that's my next system. I'll wait until it's available... I'm patient.

Chris

Doh.. someone beat me to this.

I'm buildling a Pentium M 2Ghz system using PFU M-ATX motherboard at the moment (just waiting on the 150W PSU)

Looks a great little board pity I spent 49,000JPY on the PFU one

Spec as follows :-

Pentium 2Ghz
PFU M-ATX motherboard
1Gb
2 X 80GB 2.5mm
150W Slient PSU
DVD/CDR
Silverstone SST-LCO2 Case
RealX Card



Tora

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18467

Basically, 2.13ghz 533 buss early next year!

AOpen USA just informed me that there are no plans to make this board available in the US or Canada.

But things like this are not set in stone: Anyone with the least bit of interest should contact AOpen and let them know there is indeed interest on this continent! SPCR member/reader actions have influenced corporate behavior in the past; let's do it again!

Got contact information?

I am sure the email addresses shown on their website(s) will do just fine.

Mike-

Please post that as I'll call every day.

Chris

I'm sure that we can get them to change their minds.

or I can see if I can find anyone willing to export them to the US


Tora

I emailed them... Come ooooon motherboards.

I sent them email at this address:

http://usa.aopen.com/company/contact/prodtw.htm

I got a reply from some guy that said the board isn't even available yet and no decision had been made. From the tone of the note, I'd say they have received a few emails.

Chris

This is the reply I revieved:

Dammit, it breaks when I try to send them something...

Just worked fine for me. Firefox .9.1.