There is just something cool about the little Atom CPU from Intel. Indeed, it’s so neat that I just had to have one. Now, the good news is that building an Atom based box will cost you well under 300 bucks. The other bit of good news is that these Lilliputian CPU’s actually make very versatile little computers. After reading Tom’s Hardware review of an Atom 230 based “nettop” machine, I wasn’t very confident in the machines ability to run Vista.
Now, granted, Tom’s Hardware sucks (sorry, but it is true) and they tested with Vista RTM rather than with SP1, which is a fairly substantial difference, but clearly there is a disparity between my experience and theirs. In short, Vista SP1 runs surprisingly well on this little machine. This includes driving a 1600×1200 display with Aero Glass enabled and running some reasonably demanding apps, like Outlook 2007. It does flash animations and media playback just fine and is good for DVD playback also. Overall system responsiveness is surprisingly quick (much faster than I expected).
I plan on making a video so people can gauge performance of this machine for themselves, though I think people will be generally pretty impressed.
If you want to build a machine like mine, you will need the following parts from NewEgg:
1 x ($69.99) MB INTEL BOXD945GCLF 945GC RT – Retail
$69.99
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1 x ($41.99) HD 160G|WD 7K 8M SATA2 WD1600AAJS % – OEM
$41.99
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1 x ($32.99) MEM 2G|KST DII667 KVR667D2N5/2G R – Retail
$32.99
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1 x ($94.99) CASE INWIN|BM639 BK/SIL RT – Retail
$94.99
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1 x ($24.99) DVD BURN LITE-ON|DH-20A4P-08 20X R – Retail
$24.99
________________________________________Total 264.95
Now, at the time I ordered mine, NewEgg was running a combo discount on the InWin case with the Lite-On DVD drive of 24.99, essentially giving me the DVD drive for free, so my total we 25 bucks cheaper than perhaps what you might get today (though NewEgg is always running combo deals, so you might actually get the machine cheaper).
Before you buy one of these machines, there are a few caveats:
1. The Intel GMA 950 will do Aero, but because the GMA’s architecture is such that T&L work is actually done on the host CPU, the 950 performs fairly poorly. At high resolutions, such as 1600×1200, the GMA struggles with Aero, and Window drags are sluggish and choppy. However, this doesn’t really impact usability, as apps still launch snappily and GDI client area (the objects inside an apps window, such as menus, scrolling, etc.) all work smoothly. Intel (or another vendor) would do well to couple the Atom with a proper GPU with full hardware T&L as this would greatly improve the scalability of the platform.
2. The newer Dual Core Atom 330 will be available on the D945GCLF2 motherboard shortly and, frankly, I would recommend waiting for this chip/mobo combo as it should cost about the same and will be quite a bit faster (executing 4 threads on two hyperthreaded cores). However, the cool thing about this class of hardware is that its so cheap that buying the new board and swapping it out the old one is sub 100 dollar proposition.
So what can you do with this hardware? Well, you could make yourself a little Linux router or web server. It also makes a fine low-end Windows Server 2008 machine (though, obviously the cost there is the server license, unless you are using it for lab purposes). I also happen to think that for a large segment of the population, this machine is a fine solution for basic web browsing and e-mail. I have been using it almost exclusively for this purpose and it has been a real eye-opener to see just how well one can get along with what is, in conventional wisdom, such an underpowered machine.
Here is a screenshot of my Atom box in action running Vista x64:
