Mini-ITX motherboards based on Intel’s Atom CPUs will be soon visible in most small desktop computers  in the near future. Cheaper in cost, consuming less space and needing low running power are some of the USPs of these Atom based motherboards. Aimed mainly towards establishments that are not in need high-level computers, the Atom based mini-ITX motherboard is the way to an eco-friendly world.

Let’s peek into what this motherboard from Gigabyte has to offer.

The overall layout of the motherboard is excellent with evenly spaced components on the PCB.

Features and build quality

This ultra-small board measuring just around 17 cm x 17 cm can easily be mounted in smaller PC cases. Based on Intel’s 945GC chipset, the Gigabyte GA-GC230D motherboard integrates the Intel Atom 230 processor running at 1.6 GHz with the FSB clocked at 533 MHz. The performance of the Atom 230 is similar to the Atom N270 used in netbooks, but consumes 4 W of power as compared to the latter at 2.4 W. The motherboard has a single DIMM socket supporting a maximum of 2 GB DDR2-533 RAM.

The Intel GM945 northbridge offers very limited graphics performance and lacks the PCI-Express slot completely. So if you expect higher performances from this board, this is an erroneous choice. The 5.1 channel audio is based on Realtek’s ALC662 codac. The motherboard has a total of eight USB ports of which four can be utilized via onboard headers. The GA-GC230D can also be a boon for those hunting for boards that can support older I/O ports such as serial and parallel for backward compatibility to make use of their older peripherals. It has one serial and parallel port each.

The overall layout of the motherboard is excellent with evenly spaced components on the PCB. The chipsets are passively cooled with aluminum heat skins while the processor is actively cooled. All-solid capacitors featured here help in increasing the life span of the motherboard.