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On 22/12/2009 23:17, Gordon Henderson wrote:
On Tue, 22 Dec 2009, Rob Beard wrote:Hi folks,I swear the kids PC knew it was due for an upgrade, just typical though it fails tonight of all days, just too late to do anything about it.Not worry though, being a Mini ITX case, I've already got ideas of the next upgrade, maybe something like this...http://tinyurl.com/y8toftx **It's an ECS Mini ITX motherboard featuring the new Atom D510 processor. From what I understand the D510 processor is one of the new dual core Atoms running at 1.66GHz and features integrated graphics on the CPU and also an integrated memory controller for better performance and a bit of a drop in power usage overall (the new CPU uses 13W).So looks like this is what the kids will be getting. It'll be more than enough for them for what they do and it means I won't have to chuck the case away (although the PSU being an obscure HP part will need replacing).I've been running a dual-core (which is HT, so 4 Tux's at boot time) MiniITX motherboard with Intel graphics for over 6 months now. I have 2GB of RAM on-board. Only changed the motherboard fan once so-far...It's very usable for my needs - except when viewing javascript heavy pages in firefox (3.5.6 currently) then it tends to grind. Chrome is better in that respect though. Most flash is OK, but as usual it won't play full-screen flash off the BBC, etc. but mplayer will play full screen videos obtained via get_iplayer. (full screen for me is 1280x1024) Alsa sound is adequate for my needs, anyway. Openoffice seems OK, but I'm not a demanding OO user. LaTeX and xdvi are OK. Occasionally xpdf grinds a little on big documents. A kernel compile from scratch is under 10 minutes. (make -j5)That looks like a nice board though - only one PCIe x1 slot, so potentially limited in terms of expansion, but for a workstation it's probably just fine.Gordon
The idea is it'll go in the kids PC, they don't do much on their PC at the moment, mainly watching videos (standard definition videos) and playing music. I don't even let them go on the net unsupervised (if they want to browse the internet they do it in the living room). So I dare say this sort of thing would be ideal. I'm hoping to get a couple of USB DVB-T sticks too but I'm sure the Atom will be able to handle decoding standard definition video okay :-)
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html