I like the new thin ITX form factor, though I don't know if I'd really settle for Atom performance, and that's not mentioning the price =/.

The board is 100$. That's a bit more than competing boards but it doesn't require a PSU. If you care about one of the unique features of this board, it's a small premium to pay.
The case is expensive but not outrageously so considering it's a boutique item. You could easily build two systems for the price of SPCR's sample.

Without further evidence, I'm not convinced the AC/DC brick used in SPCR's review is particularly efficent at a load of ~10W. Then again such details will only matter to a small number of users. What matters is that this board is the most efficient widely-available mITX board.

Hmm you say it have no 64bit support.

But if you check Intel's spec for the CPU it have "Intel® 64".

http://ark.intel.com/products/58917/

There's a small mistake on page two : "LGX AG150 back panel: Two ethernet antennae ports" => it should certainly read "two WiFi antennae ports".

@ Merlinen : The 64 bits issue is with Intel's Windows drivers, not with the CPU itself.

Drivers for the chipset or what drivers do you mean?

Product family
Chipsets
Product line
Embedded Chipsets
Product name
Intel® NM10 Express Chipset
Operating System
Windows 7 (64-bit)*(5)

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_ ... nloadType=

As I understand it, good graphics drivers are only available for 32 bit Windows 7.

Intel has shipped closed source drivers for its Linux distro. How good they are is anyone's guess. They're apparently not as power-efficient as the Windows version but are better than nothing. Mainstream Linux won't have decent drivers for a good while.

If you don't mind wasting a couple of watts, the lack of drivers is not an issue for servers and you can presumably use a 64 bit OS and 8G of RAM (a shop claims you can do so with the D2700DC).
For desktops, your choice of operating system at the present time is severly limited.

Intel does provide 64 bits drivers for some components, but not for all of them. They don't have 64 bits drivers for the GMA 3650 graphics for instance. So, in short, you should be able to run Windows 64 bits on this board, but not everything will work properly, notably the graphics acceleration.

@ MikeC

Did you test full-screen HD flash video playback on the DN2800MT (or the Jetway) with the new video driver? Any changes?

Furthermore, in the Jetway review you were unable to get Blu-ray playback to work, suggesting the problem might also be driver-related. Does Intel's new driver remedy this?

What version of HDMI is the port? 1.2, 1.3, 1.4?

I wish reviewers of all sites (not just here) would remember to include that information. Then we don't have to hunt around the net trying to find it. Even vendors of motherboard expect us consumers to know what the capabilities of teh chipsets provide.

Maybe I missed something, but the article only seems to give case temperatures. How hot were the cores during the stress test?

I have a Cedar Trail box from J&W Minix that has a big heat sink and no fans. The cores idle at up to 60C, and during a stress tests they can get up to 85C. I'd like to know if this is typical. I think I will take the heat sink off and redo the thermal compound, as the difference between the idle core temperatures and the pretty cool-to-the-touch heatsink makes me suspect the heat is not transferring well.

Steve

I've never seen 85C reported from my fanless Pineviews but maybe the Cedarview sensor is different.

If the CPU is that hot and there's no fan, I'd worry about the motherboard. The NM10 cheap needs to dissipate its heat as well.
What model have you got? The Intels I've looked at have heat-sensitive parts close to the CPU (predictable). The DN2800MT board is supposed to take 85C but that's more than most.

Yes, you did. See the table "Operating Temperatures" here: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1251-page4.html

Max CPU core temp was 45C.

This sound like whining to me. A bit of web research is so hard??

Intel's own web pages only state that the board has HDMI. The reality is that almost anything current out there is using at least v1.3, which goes back to 2006 and is perfectly good for 99% of applications. There are variants of 1.3, differences among which are trivial and mostly irrelevant for normal use. v1.4 was released 2009, and its spec allows up to 4096 × 2160p res (irrelevant for any monitors or TVs this PC would be used with) and 100 Mbit/s Ethernet connection that can be shared as well as 3D broadcasting protocols, but these are not implemented in any gear afaik.

Anyway, there's a link right on the first page of the review to the Intel page on the board, which provides access to the Technical Product Specification and other docs. Go through that and you find it's HDMI 1.3a.

HD Flash was tested, and generally, 720p clips all displayed fine, even full screen, with CPU utilization usually staying below 50%.

1080p flash was not displayed as smoothly -- the occasional juddering and flickering -- though it was generally watchable, and CPU utilization was both higher and more varied, ranging from ~40% (on Hunger Games 1080p clips on youtube) to as high as ~90% on BBC Earth clips.

Bluray did not work. With Power DVD, the error message indicated a driver problem.

So the CPU column is the actual core temperature, measured off the chip itself, and the top cover temperature was measured from the outside? I smell a rat. Heat from the cores is flowing into a passive heatsink, which then radiates and convects heat to a metal case, and the total drop is only 7 degrees in the worst case? That doesn't seem right, which I why I didn't think that the CPU column could represent the actual core temperature.

The only thing I smell is a careless reader.

Those are indeed core CPU temps read by SpeedFan and other similar utilities. 45C is the highest I saw at any time. The casing temps are measured using an IR thermometer, and only the hottest reading from the top of the casing is reported (as per standard SPCR testing of passively cooled cases/systems for many years).

The CPU is thermally & mechanically coupled to the case cover, which is the heatsink. Read the last paragraph of page 2.

Finally, the CPU in this board is rated for just 6.5W. Total board TDP is 8W (w/o any other components). It's no surprise that the thing runs cool.

"I smell a rat" was a poor choice of words but my Pineview CPUs often report impossible temperatures to the OS. I trust Mike's thermometer but not the CPU's.
Obviously if I was reviewing a computer I would tell the reader what the CPU reports. It's useful information.
But maybe someone can tell if the N2800 reports plausible temperatures when it's cold. If it reports a temperature below or close to ambient...

More generally, we should be careful when comparing temperatures between different cooling systems.
I believe Logicsupply did a good job with their case and heatsink which is why the price can be justified. I don't think the stock board would run that cool. It might be useful if a few of us reported our temperatures with the stock heatsink for comparison.

FYI, there is a sensor Speedfan reports as "CPU" which always reads 111C... which I dismiss.

The very latest version of http://www.aida64.com/ correctly ID's the board & CPU, and it reports the same CPU temps as Speedfan. It also reports "VRM" as 50C and "DIMM" as 53C (at full load), which matches AUX and SYSTEM temps in Speedfan.

Looks good to me. Thanks for the review Mike !
Another few months and I believe we'll be able to have one of those that can play all kinds of videos smoothly. Add a couple of external USB enclosures with low power HDs and you have a nice quiet HTPC with backup capabilities.

Why do system builders continue to make these systems with underpowered Atom CPUs when a substantially better CPU, like an i3-2100, is not much more expensive and can still be passively cooled?

I'm guessing it has to do with profit margins. That Intel board/CPU combo is ~$100 whereas an i3 2100/H61 board combo would be ~$180, nearly twice as much.

There are no Thin Mini-ITX boards w/ non-embedded CPUs, afaik. Also much harder to find any that only require 12VDC feed (obviating the need for a PSU).

I smell a rat means nothing more than I suspect things don't add up, and I still don't. A lot of motherboard temperature readings look pretty suspect, but the core temperature readings should be amongst the most dependable. They don't rely on the calibration of cheap and nasty sensors on the board. I assume the measurement of the case temperature in the article is reliable, but I would be very surprised if the cores were really as cool as is indicated.

You don't know what you're talking about. The difference in heat generated is huge.
No one makes such small fanless cases for desktop CPUs. And this case has no ventilation holes.
A similar case for a 2100 would use heatpipes and would have to be bigger. It would also be heavier, a lot more expensive and you wouldn't be able to use it environments as hot and cramped as Logicsupply's DN2800MT case allows.

An Intel ITX board + a Pentium G630T is a nice combination that's only about $50 more than the board in the article, and its idle consumption is not must different. However, its not slimline and its worse case consumption is considerably higher. It would need a significantly bigger box and a lot more heat sinking. Silent PC has reviewed a pricy but pretty nice looking fanless case for i3 and i5 processors, but its a lot different from the one we are looking at here.

EDIT by ADMIN: http://www.silentpcreview.com/HDPLEX_H3.SODD

Well I put together a i3-2100 system in an HD-Plex H3.S case with a larger SSD for $680 (w/o a Windows license) which is comparable to the $781 listed in the article. My system is a bit bigger but if a manufacturer was interested they could make a smaller version of the H3.S case that didn't have room for a 3.5" drive, yet still had room for the heatpipes. And that is not even discussing the possibility of using an mSATA drive that could shrink the system even more. FYI- my system has an IR receiver and a remote.

And won't the release of the Ivy Bridge CPUs like the i3-3240T with a TDP of 35W make such systems even more feasible in the future?

The TDP of the N2800 is 6.5W so no!

Mike made clear that you could build yourself such a system a good bit cheaper.
board: 100$
case: 120$
There are of course other expenses but it's obviously not in the same price range as an HDPLEX build.

Minor correction: I wrote the wrong figure, it should be $716, same as cited in the summary header on the first page, and this included $120 for a Windows 7 license, which brings the assembled price down to $596.

If you shop carefully for lowest cost from more than one vendor (not figuring shipping costs) and exclude unnecessary hardware (like wifi if you're in a wired home or office), the same hardware could be put together a lot more cheaply:

board $120
case - $120
adapter - $25
Intel 40gb 320 - $80
4gb RAM - $25

Net - $370 (+ shipping, taxes, OS)

My opinion : This case is very nice , but it is overkill . Such a case is perfect for industrial applications , where dust and really high temps are the biggest problems.

For everyday use, this board is rather cold and do not really need such a complex and costly case.

My company sells digital signage players rated to 35C degrees Celsius , based on aforementioned board. Whole thing is 200mm x 200mm x 44.5(1U) mm tall . There are some vents(no fans at all) in the case and CPU temps rarely go over 60 degrees (during CPU burn). During normal use they stay below 60 degrees , so there is still plenty space left ... We did some extreme testing and temps never reached more than 65C (and Iam talking 30-33 degrees ambient ).

Do not forget that this board is not meant for cpu heavy use . No one will ever use it for decoding , rendering , SETI etc.

Still, If anyone wants to cool it more , I would suggest replacing the heatsink for a beefier one...