The Aleutia Blog Our Awesome PCs use Less Power. And run on solar.

18Jul/100

New Aleutia D100 PC, Designed for Web Middleware like Flash. A digital signage PC.

From ALEUTIA - New Product Shots

W'e've been an Intel house for sometime but AMD has had some great offerings in 2010. We like the dual core D510 processor because it is fanless but the Intel boards only come with a VGA port. Zotac charges £30 more wholesale to give you a worse version of the board, albeit with an HDMI port. At the top end the Core i3 530 and Core i5 661 offer great performance and don't use much power but they are just 2 cores and they are expensive.

We've tested the i7 860 and it's a beast but it doesn't support iGP at the CPU so then you add more power and cost by putting in a video card.

There aren't many AMD mini-itx boards so we have opted for an Asrock mATX board (GeForce 8200 chipset) and combined it with an incredibly slim mATX case.

We really don't care about gaming but we do love web browsing. And the modern web contains so much middleware like Java Script and Adobe Flash that you need a better processor.

Just writing this blog on my single core AMD Neo 1.6GHz netbook CPU is frustratingly slow.

So we take a very cheap AMD single core processor (the Sempron 140) that's clocked at 2.7GHz. Most applications are still only designed to run off one core so what matters is a single fast core. It's 45W TDP so we only need one fan to cool it and of course it boasts a reasonable chipset and I/O like HDMI, DVI, VGA that makes it fine for playing 1080p content.