Saturday, March 6, 2010

Another Compact Computer

My love of building small form factor (compact) computers continues. For several weeks I've been staring at a Pentium Dual Core 1.8 Ghz CPU sitting on the desk. This CPU was removed from another computer I upgraded. Having an urge to build another computer I set out to gather parts to use to recycle this CPU. Having a spare Ark P1PH1 itx case I wanted to use I set out to look for a motherboard that would support the CPU on hand.
My research revealed that Socket 775 mini-itx motherboards are extremely over priced. Fortunately I found one reasonably priced board from Zotac. The Zotac NF610I-K-E would fit well in the Ark case and prove to be a good platform for the CPU at hand. The big brown truck delivered one a couple days later.
The build went without incident. Setting it up was about as easy as it gets. I installed 4 GB of DDR2-800 ram. Windows 7 found and installed all of the drivers. Performance was on par with the MSI G31 motherboard the processor previously ran on. Graphics seems slightly better on the Zotac board due to the onboard ION video.
The Ark case had room to spare for the motherboard and provided more than adequate cooling.
It was a good build and yielded a reasonably fast computer at minimal cost.

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