Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
drive first and the hard drive second. Save the BIOS settings and allow the
system to reboot. Insert your Windows or Linux distribution disc in the optical
drive, close the tray, and turn off the system. Restart the system, and follow the
prompts to install Windows or Linux.
Final Words
Our appliance system failed the smoke test. (No, it didn't erupt in a shower
of sparks and gouts of smoke.) When we connected power to it, the green
power LED on the motherboard lit, but nothing happened when we pressed
the power button. Hmmm. So we went back and re-rechecked all the cable
connections, and we found that the 24-pin main ATX power connector wasn't
completely seated. Pressing that down until the connector clicked into place
solved the problem, and the system started normally.
We hit a home run with this system. It's everything we hoped for, and more.
Although the benchmarks say the dual-core Atom processor is only half the
speed of the Athlon II X2 240 processor we used in the budget system and
the server system, this system “feels” reasonably responsive running Windows
7 and even more so running Ubuntu 10.4 Linux. It's obviously not suited to
heavy multitasking—nor was it ever intended to be—but for web browsing,
checking email, editing documents, and so on, it's more than fast enough.
The system is very quiet if the case fan is running at low speed. At the default
high speed, the case fan produces a whine that's audible from across the room.
Set to medium speed, the case fan is quiet enough to be inaudible from more
than a couple of feet away. (It would be more noticeable in a quiet environment,
but our den is about as noisy as most.) When Robert hooked up this system next
to the sofa in the den and powered it up with the case fan set to low, he first
thought the system wasn't running. At low fan speed, which seems adequate
to cool this system, you have to have your ear right next to the system to hear
anything at all. The Seagate Momentus notebook drive is inaudible other than
during heavy seeks, when a subdued clicking noise is barely audible.
We decided to push the limits of this system a bit, so we connected it temporarily
to our HDTV and ran some video. SD (DVD) video rendered perfectly, so we de-
cided to run a 1080p HD video clip from the hard drive to see how well the Atom
processor and 5,400 RPM hard drive could keep up. Here we ran into the hardware
limitations of this system. We're not sure if the bottleneck was the Atom processor
or the hard drive, but dropped frames and other artifacts were pretty obvious. Not
that that mattered, because we didn't design this system for media center use. The
2D video quality, running on Robert's 22” LCD display, is excellent.
What would we change? Not a thing, except maybe the hard drive. The 5,400
RPM 640 GB Seagate Momentus 2.5” notebook hard drive provides high ca-
pacity and decent performance at a reasonable price, but a 5,400 RPM drive
just isn't as snappy as a 7,200 RPM drive. If we had been willing to trade off
lower capacity against higher performance at the same price point, we'd have
installed a 7,200 RPM 320 GB Seagate Momentus hard drive. But, on balance,
we're just as happy with the larger 5,400 RPM drive. Programs load a bit more
slowly, it's true, but then with 4 GB of memory we tend to keep our most-used
programs loaded all the time anyway.