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Intel's D945GCLF Atom board up for pre-order
The U.K. gets it first
Tranquil PC is the first company that we're aware of that has listed the upcoming D945GCLF Atom motherboard from Intel as available for pre-order. The company states that the boards will start shipping from the first week of June on a first-come basis, so if you want one, place your pre-order now.
The board is quite basic and it looks just like the early shots we've seen, with a fan fitted to the large heatsink on the 945GC chipset. The Atom 230 processor is clocked at 1.6GHz and the board is limited to a maximum of 2GB of DDR2 533 or 667MHz memory.
Tranquil PC claims that the 1.6GHz Atom processor is about three to four times as fast as a 1.5GHz VIA C7 processor, which sounds slightly higher than we expected, but as there are no benchmarks, we'll have to wait a little while longer to find out if this is actually true.
The board is listed at £52.90 excl. VAT at 17.5 percent or about €66.40/US$103.70. Once you add the VAT on top of that, it's not really what we'd call the kind of bargain this platform has been touted as. £62.16 is about €78/US$121.85 and this includes a special introductory discount of £10. Considering Intel was talking US$200-250 systems, it seems like at least initial pricing is slightly off target.
You can place a pre-order here and read a bit more about the board at Tranquil PCs blog here