fanless atom

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We’ve already blogged about the D510MO Pine Trail motherboard with lower power consumption and a well thought out heatsink to keep the processor passively cooled. Unfortunately it does not work with Ubuntu out of the box – you have to flash the BIOS at least for 9.10 – but of course Aleutia does that for you before shipping it as part of our free OEM install of 9.10.

We’ve finished the stress testing of the board and will be offering it in our D1 and P1 starting tomorrow (soft launch tonight). Both feature much lower power consumption. With the D1 we’re switching from the Compucase 8K01 case we (and lots of other UK system builders) relied on before to a new, fanless model from Taiwan that is is 2/3 the size. The 8K01 has an internal brick adapter but relies on a cheap 5cm fan to keep it cool, resulting in noise, and meaning there’s just an IEC input not a DC input. Moreover, with two of the units, that noise increased over time which just isn’t acceptable. Now it will be fanless and have a 19V DC input.

The P1 is still aimed at sailboats and marine customers and so has a 6-26V DC Input with a 40GB hdd or 40GB Intel X25-V SSD (nothing larger is needed for sea navigation). It will be in a wall mount case with the option of a extra Gb lan port, making it ideal as a server. We’ve also dropped the price £80 and will now offer Win7 with it as well.

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Just before CES kicked off, Intel announced a new Atom mini-itx motherboard, the D510MO. This uses the new Pine Trail platform which combines the memory controller into the DX9 graphics controller, reducing power consumption. Intel has also finally ditched the cheapo fan it used to put over the graphics controller in favour of a large heatsink, allowing the board to be passively cooled. There are also 2 x DIMM slots (like the Asrock 330 Atom board) allowing for 4GB of RAM. The D510 CPU is also a bit faster (2 x 1.66GHz) than the 330 (2 x 1.66GHz).

The power savings are substantial. Anandtech has a great write up with load power consumption on a test system dropping from 44.2 Watts to 25.8 Watts. Idle power consumption also plummets, from 41 to 21.2 Watts.

All this is great news for Aleutia customers as we’ll be using it for our D1 starting this week helping us create a PC that is:

  • Fanless
  • Dual Core
  • 4GB of RAM
  • Affordable
  • Optional SSD

Currently the internal PSU on the D1 uses a fan but we are looking at passively cooled PSUs.

This morning we’ve just received our first batch of the boards from Intel’s biggest UK distributor. To ensure quality (and avoid any grey market issues) we only source components from Tier 1 distributors. This translates to better support for end-users as it is simple (and quick) for us to replace any failed parts.

Will have internal pictures of D1 up soon.

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