A meet & greet with ECS P45GC

A meet & greet with ECS P45GC v1.0

So then, we have seen a good number of notebooks based on the single core atom processor, and quite successfully they have been as well. look at MSI's Wind for example, they are selling like hot buns from the oven. Though the processor is not powerful enough to run some really  demanding tasks, the processor consumes very little power and is ideal for a environmental friendly Green Net PC. These Atom based Net PCs however run fast enough for Internet usage and the typical daily stuff you do on a PC.

Today, we take a look at a board that comes with this same processor.
The ECS 945GC is one of the first custom design board using a mini-DTX form factor it sizes up to 170x170mm. Roughly 1/4 of the size of your regular ATX mainboard. In case you got worried there for a second, this board will fit all ATX/MATX casings as it was designed to fit the mounting holes.

The ECS P45GC as shipped to us. This is still an engineering sample. Look at the IDE cable and try to imagine how small this mainboard with integrated processor, VGA, sound and Ethernet really is. it's a little bit longer than a memory module, fascinating.

When we take a closer look at the mainboard we spot the Intel Atom using the Intel 945GC and ICH7 chipset. The processor is soldered onto the PCB (Socket 437 processor) and functions at a FSB 533MHz system bus and  thus has an equal integrated DDR2 533 memory controller.

The new Atom 330 CPU is basically the same as its single-core counterpart, the only difference being that it will be equipped with two cores each running at 1.6 GHz, 2x512KB (1MB) of L2 cache and a power draw of get this ... only 8W. It is still manufactured on a 45nm process technology, and as stated will have a FSB of 533MHz.

Once you look at your task manager, you'll spot four cores presented to you. make no mistake, there are only two logical cores, yet each core is HyperThreading (offering four virtual cores (threads) to a compatible OS). The Atom also supports 64-bit processing, executive disable bit and it is halogen and lead-free.

We already mentioned in the introduction that this feature rich platform also comes with a lot of integrated items. This little bugger comes with Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 ( GMA950 ) with a max Dynamic Video Memory of up to 8MB. As for memory expansion, most boards only come with a single DDR2 slot. Though ECS will offer more versatile versions of the Atom 330 based mainboard, this version has only one Single-channel DDR2 memory slot for a 240-pin DDR2 DIMM socket support up to 2 GB (DDR2 533/400). Missing is a PCI Express x1 slot and a PCI Slot which the ECS 945GCT-D version of this mainboard does have.

I'd like to see that PCI Express x1 become a default slot as it could be used for add on cards like TV Tuners cards, Gigabit Ethernet etc or even a simple yet more advanced than integrated graphics card.

The P45GC  board comes with 2 X SATAII and 1 x IDE channel (for 2 IDE devices). The mainboard has an integrated sound solution as well. Don't expect high fidelity here, yet with a VIA VT1708B 6-channel High Definition audio CODEC it's absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. We also spot an 10/100 Fast Ethernet LAN using ATHEROS AR8012 10/100 Mbps PHY.

Anyway, enough tech babble .. let's have a look at the product itself in our photo shoot.