The Intel BLKD945GCLF2 Atom 330 motherboard

I don’t usually write about specific products, but I have to drop a line about this new Atom 330 based board that I picked up from newegg. First off, it’s a dual core Atom CPU (with HT) that clocks in at 1.6ghz in 8 watts. Two SATA 2 ports and a single IDE attach the storage, 1 PCI slot, 1 DDR2 DIMM slot, onboard RTL gigabit LAN and Intel analog video with s-video out. Pretty much a 3 generation old PC. But here is the kicker, this little board runs EVERYTHING! Right now, I’m triple booting OSX (Kalyway with 0 tweaks, it just works) Mint Linux XFCE and VMWare ESXi (!). The ESXi did require me to smack in an intel based NIC, but the ICH7 chipset allows you to use the onboard sata storage as VMFS. The only real drag about this board is that it tops out at 2 gig of RAM, otherwise I would be ordering these things in bulk!