James C. Liu's Weblog

Thursday December 13, 2007

A holiday motherboard Special

Just in case folks wanted to go green for the holidays in terms of our computing desktop, here's a -fanless- low-powered Intel "Little Valley 2" motherboard that started selling on Monday at NewEgg. Hopefully the link is still good - last time, they ran out in less than 3 days on the Lil' Valley 1 version of the board. I also noticed they posted a Retail Kit version for $2 more.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121326

The form factor is actually mini-ITX which is micro-ATX compatible but the whole mobo with soldered on CPU, graphics, networking, audio, is just 6.7 inches square. Price is just $65 and it listed today at newegg. This is $10 cheaper than the next closest competitor with stock on this item (mini-box.com).

Last time they had a sale, newegg sold out in 3 days or less on the Little Valley 1. This new board features a new Conroe-L-based Celeron 220 cpu that's even lower-power but supposedly faster than the version 1 of the board. Plus the new board has 2 SATA ports. Rest of the features include 1 IDE port, 1 DIMM slot (1GB DDR2 max), two sets USB pin headers + 2 usb onboard in the back, front panel audio header pins, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, 1 parallel, 1 serial port, and 1 PCI slot.

I purchased a new iStar storm 3 mini ITX tiny tower case with 80W high efficiency power supply. Newegg also has highly rated Wintec AMPO memory, 1GB DDR2 5300 dimms for $19 (w/ heat spreader!!!) and you may want to get the Samsung slim DVD burner which I've verified is truly ATAPI compliant. (not like that $38 cheapy APOS DW-ISD081 Dual Layer for $38 at pcdirect.com which didn't work properly for ATAPI compatibility, even with th pin 45/47 jumper hack).

URLs for case, dimm, and burner are:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811165041
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820161675
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827151135

The case comes with adapters for small notebook disk drives. I'll be using a toshiba 120GB MK1246GSX notebook SATA disk, which is also on special.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149068

I have 2 systems running with the previous Lil' Valley 1 board w SXDE 1/08 b79 and swapped out the 40mm cpu fan with newer, quieter mini-Kaze 40mm fans. They each have 94+% efficiency DC power supply systems (like the one that comes with the iStar case). They run at 25 - 32 Watts on average. I'm hoping to shave a few more watts off the power envelope, get quieter and run faster.

Happy system building this holiday (while supplies last!)

December 13, 2007 01:43 PM PST Permalink