Intel D945GCLF2 Essential Series Mini-ITX DDR2 667 Intel Graphics Integrated Atom Processor Desktop Board - Retail

First, let me state an obvious thing: this board is not for everyone. It is a small, low-power computer mainboard built, designed and made (although not in that order) to use precisely as that, a small computer.It measures exactly 17 by 17 centimetres, five centimetres tall. It has an Atom processor running at 1.6 GHz, enough power to run various flavours of Linux and Windows XP, but you don't want to run Vista on it. Why would you want to run Vista at all, I wonder? Well, that's another entirely different question.It is a very limited board. It has a single memory slot, up to 2 gigs of DDR2 memory, shared with the video chip, which has both a VGA port and a s-video port, so you can plug it to a tv. It also has a single PCI slot, so you can install, let's say, a wireless network internal card or an i/o card. But it has 8 USB ports, so you can plug a lot of stuff. It has a serial and a parallel port, a keyboard and mouse port, both ps/2 style, an ethernet port (1 gbps) and integrated audio ports that sounds good enough. It has two Serial-ATA ports and an EIDE port, no floppy port (who use floppy drives today?) so you can safely plug a couple hard drives and a couple dvd burners.This is an underpowered board, no doubt about it. But as today's underpowered machines are yesterday power computers, I'd say this baby was like a workhorse computer in 2003, or a server in 2000. It has enough power to decode most HD formats, at least those I've tested. You cad surf the net, play games that doesn't demand a supercomputer to load the splash screen and do general computing chores and tasks, all that using barely 35 watts, including one laptop hdd and one laptop dvd drive, but not the monitor.Why would you like --or want-- to purchase this baby, then? Two words: embedded computer. I'm building a small machine, so small it fits in an old Nintendo Entertainment System case. Why would I want to do that, you may wonder? Well, first of all, I doubt that a burglar will want my old, battered, ugly NES and instead focus on my shiny Blu-Ray player, that in reality is just a dvd with a shiny sticker. And last but not least, can you imagine your friends' faces when instead of launching Opera in your Wii you fire up Firefox or Chrome in your NES? It's a priceless moment, believe me.

I bought this board and overall I am a fan of it's size, specs and power usage. However, the unit has a built-in fan cooling fan for the northbridge (the CPU is passively cooled by heatsink only). My first thought was that the fan looks cheap and might fail after long term use. I was wrong about the scope...it started stuttering, whining and buzzing occasionally within a few days, and after about two weeks was doing so almost constantly. Another site has a review from someone else with a similar issue. After talking with Intel that cannot just send me a replacement fan, they must replace the entire board...and I must send them the board first and wait for them to send me a replacement. Next I talked to Amazon and a very surly customer service person told me they would set up a replacement unit to be sent out and email me about it with 1/2 hour. No email about the replacement by the next day, although I did have an email asking if the issue had been handled well by customer service. I called them again and apparently no replacement order was ever created. This customer service person was very nice and I feel truly wanted to help. But for some reason neither he nor his supervisor could create a replacement shipment for this item in their system. Ultimately they told me that the only recourse was to issue me a refund, send me a return postage label to return the item, and have me re-buy it.Item concept and specs: 4 starsItem performance: 2 stars due to failure of fan within two weeksAmazon customer service: 1 star for making me call twice and not having a system that allowed them to ship a replacement

I built a Hackintosh with this board and installed Mac OS 10.5.6 via 10.5.4 using info on the insanelymac forums. The unit might barely play 720p MPEG2 HD video with Quicktime or EyeTV but seems to gag on 1080i or on 720p H.264. But I am not sure that I have the drivers optimized for this board. I'll update if I find out how to get better performance. From the specs, I would have expected it to be almost on par with the last generation Mac Mini Intel Core Duo with Intel Graphics, which can handle 1080i MPEG2.The system is fine for web browsing, word processing, and even for iPhoto and for standard def Quicktime movies.Getting the sound chip to work is a hassle. I accidentally got it to work using the hacker community recommendations, and then I reinstalled the OS, and now I can't get it to work again. Only output sound works when it works. I've never gotten the input sound to work. So far, that is in agreement with the hacker community.The video worked out of the box but treated my monitor as generic. Updating the drivers with the hackers' version fixed that. It can now detect my Viewsonic model. The rest of the hardware just worked, including the gigabit ethernet. Too bad it doesn't have a DVI or HDMI output. I haven't tested the S-Video output. No problem yet (1 week) with the fan others have complained about.I had parts sitting around (HTPC case, hard disk, DVD-RAM/RW/W drive). I had to buy a 2G DDR2 ram stick for $22. I bought PC-6400 because it is backward compatible with PC-5300. If I bought everything new at today's (discounted or sales) prices, my total cost would be about $230 for the hardware. Not bad. But in about 4 months, I should be able to put together an Nvidia Ion Atom 330 system with much better graphics performance and HDMI and maybe dual monitor support for about the same price. I'll probably pull the Intel board and replace it with the Nvidia board. I'l have to buy some DDR3 memory.