A Review of the Pentium M on the Desktop - Two options
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In the options department, there are currently two ways to go as far as making your system is concerned. One is the AOpen i855GMEm-LFS, which uses a normal Pentium4 heatsink retention module, so you can fit almost any standard s478 cooling device to it. This board also makes use of the ubiquitous ICH4 south bridge, to bring at least some semblance of common features to the party... but it's still two generations behind what's fitted to normal ATX Intel boards.
The other option is the DFI 855GME-MGF, which has, instead of a normal cooling system, an odd arrangement that roughly fits the same dimensions as an AMD north bridge cooler. They supply their own heatsink to fit this socket, and it honestly is the smallest processor cooling device I've ever seen on an a recent Intel or AMD system. The VIA EPIA is capable of running passively, with an even smaller sink on top of it; however, the performance is not comparable whatsoever. They also go for a bit different market in their south bridge choice, pairing up the i855 with Intel's 6300ESB chip. This provides a feature set that includes a 64bit PCI-X slot, and SATA RAID. I'll be going more in depth on this board later this week, since it's what I'm using at the moment.
So what are my first thoughts on having this up and running? Well, let's say "quiet" is nice. After using water cooling for the past year on my main box, and an ancient SUN workstation that has a passive heatsink cooling its processor, I was pretty apprehensive about going back to an active air cooled system. I should be ashamed of thinking that. Even with the dinky fan spinning away at 6000rpm, the big fans I have moving air into the radiator and out of the system make more noise.
Next: Don't try this at home? >>
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