ECS 945GCT-D Intel Atom FCBGA 437 Intel 945GC Mini-DTX 200x170mm Motherboard/CPU Combo

Pros: Tiny, no CPU fan, low cost including CPU.

Cons: Even after moving both motherboard USB jumpers to power on (2-3) position- when computer goes to sleep, the mouse and keyboard power dies. The red LED under the mouse and all led's on the keyboard go out. Only way to wake computer at that point is to kit the power/on/off switch. Sent a email off to ESC- waiting for a reply.

Other Thoughts: Hyperthreading makes the tiny little ATOM show up as two CPU's in task manager! Love it!!
Seems like it handles all common office tasks easily, like much faster more expensive CPU's.
Put a 16GB SSD hard drive in my rig- my Kill-A-Watt meter shows 30 watt total system draw while running under load, Not bad. I'm going to build a 1/2 dozen workstations on this platform w/the SSD hard drive.

If wake from USB worked- I would give this little gem 5 eggs.

Pros: This Atom board along with a Fortron Source APFC power supply, pair of the Kingston 1gb (2gb ddr2 533 kit) and XP pro. Its doing audio transcoding work for radio, while also doing net server, and several other jobs simultaneously. The onboard VIA sound chip makes a great score on RightMark Audio Analyzer--you can set 44.1, 24bit (MUSIC!!) as native rate, runs lagless, and its worth the entire price of this motherboard. The onboard Lan isn't a problem at all (up the buffer figures and disable windows power saving of net and usb), doing quite a nice job at 80,000kbps without loading up the CPU. Uptime so far is about a week, totally stable while taking a beating 24/7, and its effortless because the CPU average is just 5%. Amazed! That's much more stable than a maxed out Phenom board. Now, this doesn't get warm at all, but its ready for summer by some of the quiet Coolermaster fans pushing air into the case. Industrial quality server makes no noise and saves energy?

Cons: Cons? Well, I would have appreciated 2 PCI ports instead of just one, so please add a MATX size to the lineup. ;) And, with the amazing quality of this board (plus bonus high end lagless audio included onboard), you guys are really in for some high expectations from the rest of your product line.

Other Thoughts: I shut off the Intel XD bit feature to put the memory into 32 bit mode for simplicity with 2gb ram. I also set the video to a fixed memory pool amount. And, I used a figure of 145 for the speed feature for 1.75GHz because 8% up is within published "normal" spec for Atom. OH, and also locked the ram speed in at 533, 4-4-4-10 (conservative, but throughput is like dual channel so it gets the onboard video up to speed). Do move the USB/PS2 power rear jumper to "on" position. I also turned off the CPU power saver and temp features (because I just used a quiet slow fan at side of case). As for hard drives, I should have used Western Digital AAK* series, especially their IDE (70MB/s), but maybe next time. I didn't know when I bought this board that it has a micro-timer, making it a multi-tasking wonder, and none of the onboard is reliant on CPU speed. A very fast Atom? What were you thinking with that? I love it!!
ECS suddenly raised the bar, and not discreetly.

Pros: I ordered this for a low power-consuming system to put aboard a school bus. It's dead silent, especially with a SSD. 2 slots for memory also a huge plus.

Cons: I could not get to work with any 2/1 PCI riser I could find. Sorry, that was a deal breaker. Why make an ITX size (ok it's a DTX) board and not support a riser??? I just built 20 systems and will build 1500 more with an alternate board instead-- see below.

Other Thoughts: I will keep it around the office, probably to make into an Acronis Disk Image Server... One of my pet projects. I'm using the Intel D945GCLF2 now, out the window goes my dream of a dead silent system

Pros: lan is screwy with win xp, doesn't work with ubuntu linux 8.04.

Cons: bad lan

Other Thoughts: i think my onboard lan is messed up b/c its screwy with xp and linux can't get it to work at all. i solved the problem by installing a zonet pcie 1x card.

Pros: No fans! Onboard video works reasonably well. CPU is hyperthreaded (but not dual-core). Onboard audio sounds alright. Plenty of USB ports on the back. Can run in an open case with no fans 100% stable (didn't try with the case closed, tho).

Cons: Northbridge sucks down (relatively) a lot of power and produces a bunch of heat. Using a laser thermometer, with no air movement at all in an open case, the northbridge idles at around 60C while the CPU stays around 30-35C. I put in a 60mm fan in the case (which will be for a car computer install) and the northbridge temps dropped to around 35-40C idle. Consider any case fan when using this board, even a quiet one will help. The shipping BIOS revision can show you the CPU temp in the boot setup, but not the northbridge, which will almost always be hotter and is just as important to stable operation. However, even running without a fan, the board was 100% stable.

Other Thoughts: Looks to be a resilient little board. Too bad the northbridge draws so much power, I was hoping it would use less power than the old Epox board with its Via C3 that it replaced, but this struggles on bootup with my DC-DC power supply. Going to replace my HD with solid state to see if it helps. The network adapter isn't a common chipset so you will need a driver disk, and some modern live CDs (Ubuntu Feisty) won't recognize it.

Pros: More features than Intel's current desktop atom offering: Dual DDR2 slots (why only single channel?!?!), PCI AND PCIe-x1, and NO FAN... silence is golden! Mini-DTX just looks like mATX, with about an inch sliced off the bottom...

Cons: Potential for ECS quality issues as opposed to Intel manufactured boards. No Gigabit ethernet, and it's not a Mini-ITX like Intel's boards... an unfortunate side-effect of including both PCI and PCIe-x1...

Other Thoughts: Should be solid as a NAS server with 2 SATA drives. It's on its way here and I should have it tomorrow! :) As of yet I'm unsure of the actual Atom processor used on this board. I assume it's a 230 since it's called "single core"... would be nice if ECS will soon release a version of this board with the Atom 330 (dual core with Hyperthreading) along with adding Dual-Channel Memory... and perhaps gigabit lan, DVI, and a couple more SATA ports??? Pretty Please??! :)