Intel Atom for Computer. Which on to chose.

[jm82792]

I've read that some people have issues with these motherboards, what one should I buy if any of them?
Please share the model of the one you purchased and that your happy with, or the one that is known for being decent. I've heard some have latency issues and wish to avoid that, or any other interesting issues.
Thanks for your time,
Josh M.

[ger21]

If you search the Mach3 Yahoo group for "atom", there were quite a few posts about atom motherboards in February of this year.

[acondit]

Josh,

I bought a Intel D525MW motherboard. It has the parallel port on the motherboard. I am using it with EMC2 and the latency numbers are quite reasonable after you turn off a couple things in the bios. I had to upgrade the bios since then no problems with EPP mode. The D510MW has a problem with EPP mode (there is a utility that can put it in EPP mode but the bios setting doesn't work).

Alan

[Walky]

Acondit, have you tested Mach3 with that motherboard?, I'm considering getting one of those for an embedded PC+drivers box eventually.

[acondit]

Walky,

Sorry, I don't do Windows.

Alan

[PaulRowntree]

Please forgive my ignorance, but I thought the Atom is a lightweight chip, created for the low-power and non-intensive applications. Why would you want to put such a device in your machine? Especially when more powerful chips are readily available for not much more cost. This seems like a false savings to me, unless there are some very attractive features I have not heard about.

[aarggh]

The atom's are lightweight in power but are quite powerful in processing, so for me, if it's more than powerful enough to run Mach3 or EMC, but uses less than 20% of the power of a traditional PC, that's a nice cost saving that can be achieved given the massive amount of time it would be on.

Assuming the parallel port issues don't kill the concept that is!

cheers,
Ian

[acondit]

Originally Posted by PaulRowntree Please forgive my ignorance, but I thought the Atom is a lightweight chip, created for the low-power and non-intensive applications. Why would you want to put such a device in your machine? Especially when more powerful chips are readily available for not much more cost. This seems like a false savings to me, unless there are some very attractive features I have not heard about.

Paul,

My D525MW has a dual core atom 1.8ghz. You can run it off very low power which makes it ideal for putting inside a CNC controller box. I am running with a 32gb SSD and 2gb memory. Without the CNC machine running it is virtually silent. Since some guys are still running EMC2 on 400mhz pentium boxes, it has plenty of processing power and is very responsive. Mine cost me less than $80 for the mb.

Alan

[cyclestart]

D510MO with EMC2 working well for me. It's running fan-less, 2GB ram and the HD is a laptop model.

If parallel port is needed you'll need to find or build a cable. The EPP thing has proven to be a non-issue using a Gecko G540 (yes, I'm aware this contradicts the Gecko manual). With Alan's Mesa set-up EPP is a must afaik.

[dfmiller]

I am using this board and I am very happy with it.
Intel® Desktop Board D525MW

Its got a PP.
The testing I have done running XP is that I am using less than 20 ish percentage of processor running cutting.


Dave

[animus_divinus]

i have a lenovo S10 10.2 inch netbook with the atom processor.. has a mini expresscard slot that i have used to add a serial port to the tiny little netbook to run my machine when its done

[jm82792]

Thanks for all the input, I'll go off of it with my purchase. I did find my old pentium 4. I dislike it's size, however I'll use it until I can build a intricate metal case for my new atom motherboard.