Gigabyte GA-GC230D review

Verdict:

Review Date: 18 Sep 2008

Price when reviewed: £51

Supplier: http://www.lambda-tek.com/componentshop

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Intel's Atom is a low-power processor designed for use in laptops and PCs such as Asus's Eee Box, which is reviewed in this month's What's New on page 27.

The GA-GC230D is a Mini-ITX motherboard with a built-in Atom, and it is ideal if you want to build your own tiny PC. See this month's Computer Workshop for details on how to do it.

The motherboard measures 170x170mm, so is around two-thirds the size of a microATX one. The board is large enough to have a reasonable selection of ports. There are four USB2 on the rear and two headers for up to four additional ports, two SATA ports and an IDE port and a PCI slot. There's only one memory slot, for a maximum of 2GB of RAM, and only a VGA video output rather than DVI or HDMI.

The Atom 230 processor has a single core running at 1.6GHz, so its scores of 54 in the Shopper benchmarks and 1,186 in PCMark Vantage are significantly slower than even the cheapest Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Phenom processors. However, the GA-GC230D ran Vista smoothly and could play back standard-definition video files, although it couldn't play Blu-ray movies smoothly.

Gigabyte's GA-GC230D is inexpensive for a processor and motherboard combination, and it is an economical way to build a standard-definition media centre PC or a basic PC for surfing the web. It's just a shame that there's no DVI or HDMI output, as there's no way to add one later.

Author: Chris Finnamore

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