Intel 847 with NM70 review - Introduction

Intel Celeron 847 with NM70 Chipset - If you like tiny

Here at Guru3D we have a tendency to test the biggest and most bad-ass hardware, but admittedly we do have a soft spot for the rather tiny gear which let's admit it, always is the coolest stuff. Today for example we'll look at a motherboard that is 17cm wide and long and houses on the Mini ITX form factor. You know, the ultra silly small motherboards that offer fair enough performance yet come with decent integrated processor and graphics subsystem that just oozes with features and value.

In the past we have tested Intel Atom based solution or AMD's E350 for example, and let's not forget about the impact that NVIDIA ION made, the combination of a small form factor motherboard, an "okay" processor and power full graphics sparked and ignited the netbook and net-top market.

Also another segment suddenly became interested in these products, the HTPC audience. And when we look at the SOHO segment, a lot of NAS servers these days are equipped with small form factor products with ATOM.

Hip and relatively new are the 17 Watt TDP based 847/870 Celeron processors series paired with an NM70 chipset, as tested today. That's a dual core processor being embedded into the motherboard. Combined with the chipset you get a Full HD experience and multi-channel audio as well.

Typically the gear being is used for low-end solutions, the net-top and net-book market. For prices hovering in the 75 EUR bracket you can purchase yourself some interesting stuff, and sure let me immediately make clear that this is not high-end processor kit in terms of performance, again this is netbook / entry level performance at best, but the combination of the GPU+CPU being embedded paired with a  very long feature-set is interesting. 

We peek at the cutest Mini ITX motherboard from ECS today, have a look at some of its performance on the CPU and GPU side of things but most of all, we'll discuss features as what these products bring to the table is just downright impressive for the money as you'll notice DDR3 support, SATA-600 support, HDMI support (Full HD), Gigabit Ethernet and audio support and then the integrated dual-core processor at 1100 MHz and in that processor embedded DX10 ready graphics core.

The product we test today is the ECS NM70-I2. Have a peek what we are talking about and then let's head into the article.