A.blog

VIA as the leader od mini-ITX boards recently got a new competitor. Intel stepped on the mini-ITX scene with a new board, made by themselves.

Although Intel manufactures mobile CPU’s for such systems, they decided to make their own board. We would expect an Intel chipset on the board but they decided to go with the SiS (Silicon Integrated Systems) chipset - VIA’s competition.

What can we expect from Intel D201GLY

Intel’s mini-ITX board carries the name “Little Valley” for which we don’t quite know, how it got there. We can only imagine …

Green color of the board is pretty generic and nothing special. The board also has some aluminum heatsinks that cover the most important chips on the board.

One of the biggest HSF’s that cools the CPU has a quiet 40mm fan. This cooler is also the tallest element o the board. Underneath it is a Intel Celeron 215 processor with a 533MHZ FSB. It is based on a Yonah core that we see in Intel’s Core processors. More specifically the Core Duo and Core Solo. So basically we have a CPU from the Core Solo family which runs at 1,33GHz and has a 512KB L2 cache. Not that bad for a board of this size.

The main chipset is the SiS662 that integrates a SiS graphic card. The card itself is a SiS Mirage 1, which isn’t new and for the today’s time it’s pretty bad (DirectX 7). But nevertheless it doesn’t consume much energy and is therefor suitable for this system.

Sound comes from a ADI 1988 (SoundMax) which is in fact a cheap 6 channel AC’97 audio codec. Ethernet is provided by a Broadcom chip with 10/100Mbit/s speed. The hardware, serial, parallel and PS/2 ports are controlled by a Winbond chip.

The board support DDR2 RAM memory. The bad thing is that it has space for only one module. The size and the speed are also limited. 1GB is the maximum capacity and 533MHz is the maximum speed.

For the power of the board you need a 20 pin ATX connector and also a 12V 4-pin connector. If you don’t have both plugged in, the board won’t even POST.

A PCI slot is also present. I don’t have to mention what you can put in there.
External connectors
If we stop by the I/O panel of the board, we won’t find anything specific.

• 2x PS/2

• Parallel port (LPT)

• Serial port (COM)

• VGA

• 2x USB 2.0

• Ethernet (LAN)

• Audio (speakers, mic, line-in)

I wish it had more USB ports. A TV-Out would also be nice.

Bundle

The bundle is classic for a bulk version of the board. So this means, that the board doesn’t come in a fancy cardboard box, with detailed instructions. It’s basically in a static sensitive bag. But you do get a CD with drivers, IDE cable, an I/O shield and a sticker which pictures the main elements on the board.

What about performance?

Overall performance of this mini motherboard isn’t good if compared to the new (today’s) systems. But we know that this kind of motherboard isn’t meant for hardcore gaming or heavy application use. The performance is somewhat equal to the “old” AMD Athlon XP series of processors. The integrated graphic card isn’t powerful because it is DirectX 7 compatible and on top of that it “steals” some system memory.

All this makes the system less power hungry. By specification it shouldn’t consume more than 27W of energy. I am certain that this number can go higher depending on the devices plugged on it and the power supply unit hooked up to the system.
Benchmark scores

• 3DMark 2001: 1660
• PCMark 2005: 1434
• Cinebench CPU rendering: 181
• Cinebench C4D Shading: 210
• Super PI mod 1M: 1min 2.406s
• Super PI mod 32M: 59min 24.328s
• WinRAR benchmark (KB/s): 253
• Performance Test: 262,7
• HD Tach Read Speed (MB/s): 48,1
• HD Tach Burst Speed (MB/s): 96,6
• Sandra XI Memory Bandwith (MB/s): 1960/1992
• Sandra XI CPU Arithmetic (MIPS/MFLOPS): 4548/3346
• Sandra XI CPU Multi-Media (it/s): 10397/14158
• Idle power consumption (W): 43,71
• Load power consumption(W): 51,23

For testing purposes i used 1GB of DDR2 memory that ran at 667MHz, a 160GB ATA100 hard drive and a LC Power 550W PSU.

Price

In Slovenia, the board costs around 60-75 EUR. Depending on the seller.

Conclusion

The board doesn’t offer much more that what you’d expect from a basic PC. The performance isn’t the greatest but looking at the board’s size it’s quite good. I miss a SATA connector for a hard drive, which would be very nice. And a TV-Out would also be very good.

Comparing the board, to other similar products, we see that it’s price is much more lower then the competition. So i can say, without any doubt that the board will soon become a new peace of hardware for a “mini computer lover”.

The aren’t any limits to what you can use this board for… use your imagination and use it wisely

Slovenska različica testa se nahaja tukajle.