Review of ECS 945GCT-D Socket 437 board with Intel ATOM
1.6GHz processor
Bluetooth 25 Jul 2008
Custom designed Atom Board - ECS 945GCT-D
We have seen a couple of new notebooks based on the
atom processor. Athough the procesosr is not powerful enough to run some of the
more demanding tasks, the processor consumes very little power and is ideal for
a environmental friendly Green NetPC. Today, we take a look at a board that
comes with this same processor.
Ideal for your DIY low cost web surfing machine,
the ECS 945GCT-D is the first custom design board using a mini-DTX form factor
that measures
200x170mm. This size is almost 1/4 of the size of the standard ATX. Most
importantly, this board will fit all ATX/MATX casings as it was designed to fit
the mounting holes.
It is made to support the Intel Atom (Diamondville)
using the Intel 945GC and ICH7 chipset. On board is a soldered on Socket 437
processor. The board supports up to FSB 533MHz system bus and integrated DDR2
533 memory controller.
As it is uses the 945GC north bridge, it comes with
Integrated Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950 ( GMA950 ) with a max Dynamic
Video Memory up to 8MB. As for memory expansion, most boards only come with a
single DDR2 slot. ECS doubles it to support a
Single-channel DDR2 memory architecture with 2 x 240-pin DDR2 DIMM socket
support up to 2 GB (DDR2 533/400). There is also a PCI Express x1 slot and a PCI
Slot. The PCI Express x1 slot could be used for add on cards like TV Tuners
cards, Gigabit Ethernet etc.
The board also comes with 2 X SATAII and 1 x IDE
channel (for 2 IDE devices). It is also equipped with a VIA® VT1708B 6-channel
High Definition audio CODEC and 10/100 Fast Ethernet LAN using ATHEROS AR8012
10/100 Mbps PHY.
