My old PC (Shuttle XPC SB61G2) was down, after serving me for more than five years.
I am a SFF addict so when I considered to buy a new one, it is a basic requirement. After the initial experience of atom PCs last year in working environment, I decided to build one for myself using Intel's latest Atom motherboard D510MO. My idea is to dispel the myth that Atom CPU is under power and not worth to take a look.
My initial testing system uses 2GB 800 DDR2 RAM and my existing 160GB Hitachi SATA hard-disk. I had also installed Windows 7 Home Premium and used Windows Experience Index as the first assessment tool.
Here is the summary (with the index from my old PC for comparison)
| Tests | Shuttle XPC (32-bit) | Atom (32-bit) | Atom (64-bit) |
| Processor | 3.2 | 3.4 | 3.4 |
| Memory (RAM) | 4.0 | 4.6 | 4.5 |
| Graphics | 3.4 | 2.9 | 3.2 |
| Gaming Graphics | 3.4 | 3.0 | 3.1 |
| Primary Hard disk | 5.3 | 5.3 | 5.3 |
| Overall | 3.2 | 2.9 | 3.1 |
As I transferred the harddisk to the new system, the primary hard disk performance is the same as expected.
I also added a second hand ATI Radeon display card in my old PC while the integrated graphic is used in D510MO, the performance of both Graphics and Gaming Graphics are thus inferior in the Atom box.
But excluding these two scores (you can always buy a better PCIe display with a few hundred), both the processor and RAM (DDR2 vs DDR) indexes are better in the Atom.
So it is safe to say that, Atom is at least as powerful as a P4 system (with HT), which was common when we are using Windows XP (date back to 2001). If Windows 7 works even better than Windows XP (given enough RAM), we should have a very workable system based on Atom processor.
Microsoft has also greatly improved their office suite. I found Office 2010 beta running smoothly in my new system.
Cost Considerations
Consider that I bought my old P4 bare-bone with more than HK$4,300 while I can get my Atom bare-bone (motherboard+RAM+case+PSU) with less than HK$1,500, it is definitely a very good deal for non-heavy users/gamers.
But you can probably get a system with double performance with the HK$4,000+ price tag like Dell Inspiron 560s :
Intel(R) Core2 Duo E7500 (2.93GHz, 1066MHz, 3MB)
4GB DDR3 SDRM (2X2GB, 1066MHz)
640GB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive with Native Command Queuing
16x DVD+/-RW Drive
Excluding the additional RAM (HK$300), 640GB HD (HK$500), DVD (HK$200) and the Windows OEM license (HK$700). It is around HK$2,300. So building a system like mine can only save you HK$800+.
It is not a big deal but if you have some usable parts want to recycle, it is still worth consideration:
Intel (R) Core 2 Duo E7500 ----- HK$800
2GB DDR3 (1066MHz) ----------- HK$415
A motherboard ----------------- ~HK$700
Total ~ HK$2,000
D510MO ------------------------ HK$740
2GB DDR2 (800MHz) ------------- HK$330
Total ~ HK$1,070
There is still around HK$900 saving (which is around 50% of the cost) which can be used to add more RAM or a larger harddisk to keep your photos.
At least you can a more green PC : )
