Re: [9fans] how about intel D510MO

[John Barham <jbarham@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 3:13 AM, Alex <zhaodu1@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone, I've been playing plan9 in qemu for sometime now. the
> only computer I have is a PS3/ubuntu9.04, and I'm thinking about buy a
> low cost x86 board for plan9. Is intel D510MO a good choise?

I can't comment on how this motherboard runs Plan 9 but I'm using it
as a headless Linux server to run venti and do Go programming.  I put
it into a mini-box.com M350 enclosure w/ their 80W picoPSU-80 power
supply (selling in a kit for $69).  Add some RAM and a hard drive and
you have a very compact, reasonably powerful system.  Since the board
is passively cooled w/ a heat sink and the PSU plugs right into the
board, the only noise comes from the HD.  Most sites rate the idle
power draw at ~20 watts.  Overall I'm very pleased w/ it.  I should
note though that the case does get warm above the heat sink.

However since the Atom doesn't support ECC RAM (for that matter
neither does the mighty Core i7) I'm somewhat cautious about trusting
it as an always on file server without additional checksums in
software.  Pretty much all AMD chips support ECC RAM, although of
course mobo/BIOS support is a different matter.

  John