Home > Consumer Reviews > Intel D945GCLF Essential Series Mini-ITX DDR2 667 Intel Graphics Integrated Atom Processor Desktop Board - Retail

The Intel D945GCLF motherboard is a great product. This is a super way to start building a computer without the time-consuming complexity of buying many compatible components and assembling them into a working system. So far, I've bought two of these boards and expect to buy more in the future as Intel continues to improve this chip / board product line.

You'll need to add a hard drive, ram memory, a case/power supply, external speakers, keyboard, mouse, monitor, and operating system. But that's all stuff you can pretty easily plug together. You may already have some of these key parts lying around as spares from existing or antiquated computers.

I installed several different versions of operating systems, settling on a copy of Ubuntu for daily use. It's fast, fun, and free.

I have shown this board to a number of very knowledgeable, computer savvy friends who were impressed enough to quickly buy one for their own use. It's cost effective and ruggedly reliable. (I wouldn't recommend a drop-test, but I did drop it off the back of a van and it kept working.)

I've found the processor performance to be quite acceptable for web browsing and basic administrative tasks. The system boots surprisingly quickly. The outstanding energy efficiency is appealing, ideal for any systems that are left on for extended periods of time (e.g. in home servers, security systems, or environmental control devices.)

This product is an exceptional value for a low-cost desktop system. You could also use it as a component in an embedded PC-compatible systems. If nothing else, it's a fun, inexpensive, and powerful way to explore and experiment with new computing technologies.

First of all, this is a nice, small motherboard/CPU combo. I'm happy with it, but it has a few things that I would really like to fix about it.

1. See that fan in the picture? It's not on the CPU like you'd expect. It's on the north bridge. Seriously, if you make a low-power CPU, you have to do something to get the north bridge to be low-power too. That's just crazy.

2. I bought a Zalman fanless northbridge cooler (the blue fan-shaped one) to replace the loud fan that comes with this board. For some reason, Intel drilled holes through the board in four places to install mounting brackets, but only put the brackets in two of the places, and it was the two that this particular cooler does not use. Disappointing, but my fault for not checking.

3. Realtek network chip. Again, my fault for not checking ahead of time, but I assumed that an Intel motherboard would have Intel integrated networking. In the future, I will be more careful. Realtek chips have terrible support in Linux and BSD, so I ended up having to use up the only PCI slot to install a supported network card, which is frustrating when it has a port right on the motherboard.

Overall, the build quality is good, and it is a great little board. I'm using it in a little NAS box I built, and it runs FreeNAS well.

This motherboard is cheap, small and having good support on Linux. I used Ubuntu 9.04 32-bit. I found the 64-bit version has power management problem that causes one core is running on power management all the time.

But, the big pain is, after few months, the fan is getting noisy. The sound is tooooooooo loud. I am looking for a replacement for it. If you know a good alternative to the CPU fan on the board, please let me know.

This is a great little board. I installed XPPro, Vista and Windows 7 RC.

All installed without a hitch. The board will play standard Def Video (AVI) just fine. Just keep in mind that this processor and intel video does not have the power for highdef x.264.

Even though this board is geared toward "Internet-centric" and basic productivity applications, if you happen to be looking for a great little rig to run 2D games on, this may well be the best deal going. With it's miniscule size, price tag, and power consumption, the D945GCLF is very versatile. It runs console emulators like FCEUX and ZSNES at full screen 60 fps, with all the scaling and interpolation I can throw at it. Maybe you would like to build a LAN party box to go and play Starcraft, Age of Wonders, Icewind Dale, etc? It would also make a swell brain for a MAME or Mugen cabinet. If you want to get even better multimedia performance, as well as the ability to use a TV for s-video output, definitely consider springing for this board's stronger sibling; the D945GCLF2 has a dual-core version of the Atom, as well as gigabit ethernet.