After dealing with the numerous issues of my previous AMD Geode carputer motherboard, I decided to upgrade. Some of the problems I had were hanging at POST, bluescreens due to driver issues, and overall weird behavior. I also wanted more features, such as the ability to boot from a USB drive. Not only that, but the board ran pretty hot in my glove box and lacked performance that I wanted.
Alas, the Intel D945GCLF2, based on the Intel Atom, is finally released. One of the key features that caught my eye was the dual core Atom processor. Not only is it dual core, but its power usage is outstanding. It's estimated to use 4 watts under load while consuming milliwatts (thousandths of a watt) when idle. Being in a carputer, power consumption is a vital specification because you need to figure out how large of a power supply you will need. The power consumption spec can also give you an idea of how much heat will be disappated, because after all, the power not used for computing will dissipate into heat.
The power supply I am using is an Opus 120. It's rated for 120 watts and has powered my previous build just fine. I ran into one snag that I didn't expect, however. The motherboard uses a 12v P4 ATX connector (see pic on the website) as well as the standard 20-24pin ATX connector. The power supply I have (and most that I've seen) do not have this connector incorporated into their harness.
To solve this problem, you can either purchase a molex to P4 adapter, or you can mod your existing wiring harness and add the P4 connector. I chose to mod my existing wiring harness and add the P4 connector to one of the existing molex connectors. Basically, I cut off the P4 connector from a regular ATX power supply, stripped the wires, and crammed them into an existing molex connection. See the pictures on the website to see what I mean.
After everything was setup, I installed the full Windows XP Pro with SP3. I opted not to use TinyXP because I felt that it could cause issues down the road with all the drivers it has stripped out. After the installation, I installed the usual Winamp, VLC media player, SpeedFan, iGuidance, Centrafuse, and finally the drivers. Instead of configuring Windows to hibernate after the car was shut off, I chose to shutdown completely because I've had lots of issues with hibernation such as it not resuming correctly.
With 1GB of RAM and a 2.5" 80GB 4200RPM hard drive, the performance isn't too bad. You would think that a 4200RPM hard drive would be kind of sluggish, but I can hardly notice it. Windows starts up from a cold boot quickly and so do all of the programs I use. I'm never left waiting for the next song to load or a program to open.
The low power consumption of the board is also very noticeable. With my old board, the CPU temperature would always be at least 45C upon boot, and rise to a little over 60C after being used for awhile. On a cold morning, at about 55F, The Intel Atom managed to boot up at 30C and after 20 minutes, it had only risen to 35C! Now, when I open my glove box, there's no more hot air oozing out. The air inside the glove box is almost the same temperature as the air in the cabin! However, the temperatures will differ based on the ambient temperature inside the cabin, so the CPU will run hotter on a warmer day. On an 80F day, the CPU boots at 30C and rises to about 55-60C, still not bad on a very warm day.
All in all, the Intel D945GCLF2 is a great buy. At only .99 from Mini-box.com, you get tons of features, and best of all, a dual core processor. With low power consumption, low temperatures, and high performance it seems as if the board was made explicitly for carputer usage, in which it excels.
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