Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I bought this more as an experiment to see if the new Atom dual-core motherboard with the GMA3150 IGP could handle everyday tasks as a nettop like surfing the net, watching Youtube videos, checking email and running productivity software. I really want to start scaling back the power requirements of the PCs in our house, especially given their usage as either nettops or file servers. The kids will be needing new PCs soon for homework and something "green" is my preference as long as it's powerful enough and this board seems to fit the bill. I also wanted to use some of the parts I had lying around like the HDD and ODD. With that, I am very happy with what I was able to build for under $200. It's definitely faster -- much faster -- than the Dell 9300 laptop it's going to replace as the family PC. The lowest WEI value was 2.0 for Gaming/Business graphics. That is a non-issue since that is not what this is going to be used for.
This is a very good value for a processor, motherboard and IGP combination. It's also very efficient which is going to help with the electricity bill and carbon footprint of the household. Surprisingly, it's very responsive and I have no trouble doing the tasks I expected to be able to do like surf the 'net, play music, upload/view photos and use OpenOffice under Windows 7 Home Premium.
However, for maybe $30 more upfront I could have purchased a more powerful CPU/ITX motherboard combination like an E3300/DG41AN that would have performed much better. Of course, the power draw would have been a lot higher. You definitely pay a premium for newer more efficient technology. The CPU is also not passively cooled and the little fan is definitely audible, especially in the cheap case I put it in. If it had been passively cooled or the CPU fan had been silent I would have given it 5 stars easily. So far it's done everything I've asked it to knowing though I am not going to be watching HD video on this. The upcoming Intel D525MW board looks to be passively cooled but it's not available yet. That one is worth watching and might be a better nettop board for a silent build. I can see using this one with the 4 SATA ports in a home server/NAS build instead. It looks like it would be perfect for that, especially with Gigabyte's "UD" construction.
Build:
Athenatech A1089HG.150 case
Kingston 2GB 240-Pin DDR 1066 KVR1066D3/2GR RAM
Western Digital 400GB WD4000AAKS HDD
Lite-On IDE DVD/CD burner
Rosewill RNX-N250PC 802.11 b/g/n PCI wireless adapter
Windows 7 Home Premium
Click Here to see more reviews about: GIGABYTE GA-D525TUD Intel Atom D525@ 1.8GHz 1M L2 cache BGA559 Intel NM10 Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo
Gigabyte GA-M68MT-D3 NVIDIA MCP61/MCP68 Chipset Driver 15.56 for Vista Matherboard
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