Gigabyte GA-GC230D Atom Mini-ITX

Item: Gigabyte GA-GC230D Atom Mini-ITX
Author: Richard Swinburne

Written by Richard Swinburne

September 10, 2008 | 08:14

Tags: #16ghz #945g #atom #benchmark #diamondville #efficient #hd #high #itx #mini #motherboard #playback #power #result #review #silverthorne

Companies: #gigabyte #intel

Conclusions

Well we always knew the Atom didn't exactly have lightning performance - it's about twice as slow as an equivalent full fat CPU, depending on the benchmark, but compared to the older VIA C7s it's quite a bit nippier. We'll compare it to the new VIA Nano in the coming weeks, but we expect the cost difference to be the same as the performance in some respects.

The Atom can even run Vista-x64 perfectly fine, but it's notably sluggish in places. Intel's GMA950 graphics core is basic at best, although again somewhat correlative to VIA's it is barely Vista Aero capable - there's some clear lag if you try to do too much at once with transparency windows overlapping. That's likely just as much due to the very limited memory bandwidth as well though and there's a strong argument to the fact we shouldn't even be considering the use of Microsoft's very resource intensive OS on such a slim platform anyway.

When we installed XP however it was a nippy little beast and could easily handle nominal activities like web surfing, document writing and SD video and DVD playback. It's generally not a HD capable system though - it'll upscale DVDs quite happily but you have to be very bit-rate aware for true-HD content and to be honest, it's not worth that effort.

The Gigabyte GA-GC230D is a perfect base to a homemade "nettop" PC and those who enjoyed building systems around the EPIA might find this a tad restrictive in its features - it has no Gigabit Ethernet, DVI or S/PDIF and the northbridge on the EPIX EX is just 3.5W compared to 22W for the 945GC on the Atom! However for the price it's a difficult argument - simply kit the GA-GC230D out with PCI cards and USB sticks for your extra needs.

For a shade over £50 you get a basic motherboard, CPU and graphics output that works perfectly well - how many times have people been fleeced into buying cheap stuff only to find it's buggy, unstable and incompatible with anything you drop into it?

Taking the price of other components into account, you could build an entire PC that uses very little power and has a very small footprint for around £135 (inc. VAT):

Obviously there are preferences for a 2GB of memory module, but we found XP is more than happy with just 1GB for basic application use unless you're a reasonably heavy multitasker or Firefox user (zing!). A 2.5" hard drive will reduce the space, power requirements and noise even further, and sourcing a 120W DC-DC PSU should be ample, more efficient and even quieter again, but will set you back more cash because it's a specialist item.

It's a fraction of the price of most VIA EPIA boards shipping and even if you just want to play with mini-ITX or make a fun little mod around it the Gigabyte GA-GX230D is perfect and will certainly not break the bank. However, in the next few weeks it's been reported that the dual-core Atom will be arriving (not that you can swap one out of the other without replacing the whole board) and in the next few months a 16W AMD Socket AM2 single-core CPU at 1.6GHz will arrive. A Sempron LE-1200 is all of £20, and this coupled with a Jetway JNC62K is nearly £100 which is twice the price but you do get something truly HD capable and a whole lot more powerful.

Final Thoughts

The Intel Atom certainly isn't incapable, it's just not as hardcore as modern performance CPUs and for the cost it's a good base for very low power, very low cost bare bones PC or any number of other uses: NAS box, server, DVD and SD video player? We would have liked Gigabyte to have included Gigabit Ethernet or one large heatsink with no fan - we've seen MSI's Wind board prove that's possible, and there's little reason not to have included the S/PDIF pin-out because the solder points are already there.

Despite these flaws, we still really like the GA-GC230D though because it inspires the imagination to do something different without emptying your wallet. We just feel that Gigabyte could have done a bit more customisation over the Intel reference design.