Intel D201GLY2A Review

While Intel's Atom processor and the matching D945GCLF/D945GCLF2 motherboard are making the news as of late, Intel has brought a few other “cheap and cheerful” highly integrated motherboards to market.

One of these is the D201GLY2. This board shares the form factor of the D945GCLF and friends, but instead of using an Atom processor, it uses a Celeron 220 processor clocked at 1.2GHz. In this day and age that seems like a slow clock speed, but it serves the purpose of keeping the heat output down and the energy consumption at a minimum.
Actually getting one of these motherboards looks to be more difficult (and possibly more expensive) than the much more common D945GCLF Atom-based board. I've only seen a few places mentioned as selling them, and when I got there, nobody seemed to have any available. This board is known as the "Little Valley", while the D945GCLF is known as "Little Falls".

Fortunately, I did find one at the same computer store where I got my D945GCLF board. And I didn't pay anywhere near retail price—I gave about $59 for it because they were tired of looking at it and the box had been opened. It was the last lonely example in their display case. I came into owning it because I wondered what it was as compared to the D945GCLF.

Upon taking it out of the box, I found some interesting differences between the D201GLY2 and the D945GCLF. The most notable difference is the presence of an SiS chipset in place of the Intel 945 Express that is used on the D945GCLF. Also noticeable is the swapped position of the heatsink and fan. The Celeron processor is now sporting a fan while the SiS northbridge has a small passive heatsink on it. And perhaps a little surprisingly, the chipset is from SiS, with their 662 northbridge and 964 southbridge being used. Video support comes from the SiS Mirage 1 video engine.

It is worth noting that a version of the D201GLY2 board is available with totally passive cooling. An elongated passive heatsink replaces the fan and small(er) heatsink on the Celeron CPU. The northbridge is passively cooled in both models. My board came with a fan on the Celeron CPU, which makes it a D201GLY2A. The totally passively cooled version is known simply as the D201GLY2.

While sliding around the World Wide Web looking for information on this board, I came to the conclusion that people don't like the SiS chipset as much as they do the Intel 945. I don't know why this is, other than the fact that SiS does not have the name or popularity that Intel does. Still, these people forget that at one time, back in the days of the 486 processor, SiS ruled the chipset market with their 496/497 products. The most common complaint I saw was with the integrated SiS Mirage 1 graphics on this board. People reported not being happy with the speed in games on the Mirage 1, where the 945 Express fared much better. These people miss the point of the D201GLY2 and the D945GCLF. These aren't made to play computer games, even if people use them that way. They're made to provide an acceptable computing experience on a severe budget or where energy consumption may be a concern.

I own some other computers (warning: the linked page is not overly dial up/slow connection/amount of transfer based charge friendly!) with SiS chipsets. They work perfectly well. I have no complaints.

Conflicting opinions exist on the subject of whether or not these boards even fit into the computer market. I say that they do, and I back that up with my years of servicing computers in the field. What I see most of the time are inexpensive computers that spend a lot of their life doing nothing more than browsing the web, writing e-mails, playing music, writing letters, managing the finances for a household or doing the odd spreadsheet.

I have seen people buy fancy (read “extravigant”) computers. This was not driven by what they were going to end up doing with them, however. They were driven by the fact that they could buy such a computer, not by the fact that they actually needed one. Very few of these systems have ever seen use that would match their capability or exceed it. Think of how many perfectly adequate low end systems (such as the Dell Dimension 2400) you have seen and compare it to the number of fancier systems. At least in my part of the world, the number of humble but adequate low-end systems far outstrips the number of fancier ones.

That's just my opinion and what I've seen. Your mileage may vary. On to the rest of the review.

Unboxing

The D201GLY2 or 2A (I'm going to refer to them both using the same model number from here on, just to keep the confusion down.) motherboard comes in a box identical to the D945GCLF except for the fact that it's a much lighter blue color.

Particularly astute or eagle eyed readers will notice that the box shot above shows a D201GLY, and not the D201GLY2/2A board. I couldn't find a ready to use box shot and was far too lazy to actually take one.When you open the box, you should find the instruction manual, a drivers CD, a backplate for the ports, some stickers and the motherboard itself. And here is the actual board:

The motherboard has two onboard SATA ports, a single PATA connection, a USB header for connection to any front mounted USB ports your case of choice may have, a 20 pin ATX power connector and a 4 pin ATX +12V power connection. Intel's inclusion of the +12V connector seems a little odd—the D945GCLF requires one as well—but it's not a big deal even if your power supply doesn't have one. A few folks have pointed out that you can easily get the required voltages from a conventional four pin drive connector if you have to. (A dead power supply could easily supply the needed connector and wiring.) You also get a single PCI slot if you want one. A single DIMM socket provides support for up to 1GB installed RAM per Intel. (More may be supported unofficially—I did not try anything bigger than a 1GB module because I did not have one.)

On the back, where the ports are, you get four USB ports, one serial port, analog VGA output, a parallel port and (of course) dedicated PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports. Intel also mentions an “optional s-video output port” although I have seen no versions of this board actually offered with such a thing. Nor have I seen any evidence of vestigial structures (!!!) such as solder pads that might have been used to provide such a port. So perhaps once again marketing and engineering have not come to perfect agreement with one another. There is also a 10/100 Ethernet connection and a set of three sound jacks—line out, line in, and microphone.

You still don't get any RAID support from the BIOS. Hey, it's a budget board—although once again I could see one of these driving a small workgroup server, network attached storage device, or web server on a bandwidth limited home broadband connection. RAID would be handy in those applications. If you really need it, you could always do it in software or put a RAID PCI card in the single PCI slot offered by the board.

The BIOS (Setup Utility)

Speaking of the BIOS, one of the first things I did after getting the board configured enough to power up was to go in and configure some of the settings to choices that work better for me. As I did this, I couldn't help but notice that there was a noticeable delay when I went from one page to the other. I later found an updated BIOS from Intel that made no difference in performance when navigating the setup screens. Since you probably won't be doing that too often, I don't think it is a serious problem.

It's also worth noting that if you're being cheap (like I was when I reviewed the D945GCLF) that once again, the POST and setup screens require the use of a display that is at least somewhat capable of SVGA. Fortunately, this time I used a Samsung SyncMaster 15” LCD panel. Everything worked fine with that.

Installation

Installing the D201GLY2 board is very easy. If you can handle a screwdriver without hurting yourself, and if you know which end to hold, you can install the D201GLY2 board without incident. It will fit in any case capable of accepting an ATX board, as well as cases that accept mini-ATX and ITX boards. The only things you need to add other than a case are power and DDR2 533 memory. (The board will happily work with faster RAM. I used a handy DDR2 800 module from Crucial and it worked fine at the lower clock speed. Not all faster RAM will be happy with the idea of being underclocked, but at least the board itself doesn't seem to mind.)

Software installation is also easy. Intel provides a handy CD that runs a centralized installer that takes care of every driver installation the board needs to function properly under a Windows operating system. I always recommend skipping these CDs (and storing them safely, for the time will come if you keep your computer long enough that the manufacturer will probably forget they ever made your computer product) and getting the latest drivers straight from the hardware makers themselves. That way you'll have the latest and hopefully best performing, least buggy drivers you can possibly get your hands on.

The installer causes a grand total of about three reboots after it installs each major driver (chipset/video, sound and networking). After each one, it picks right up and continues.

Once it's done, you're ready to do more interesting things, such as installing your own software.

I'm sorry to say that I don't have any pictures for this review (other than the one of the board with its box). I didn't go out and buy a computer case or reuse an old one for this—instead I just set the whole works on top of a Compaq Deskpro EN desktop that was insulated with papers. Then I put an Enlight 450 watt power supply (overkill), a Quantum hard disk and an old CD-RW drive into place. (If you think that's shiver-worthy, you might not want to know that I used the ignition key for my truck to short the power-on pins and make the board turn on.) One of these days I will get a proper case for this thing.

Experiences

Anyway, with the drivers and operating system installed, I found some applications and gave the board a try to see how it performed. For office work consisting entirely of spreadsheeting, word processing and the odd cut-n-paste job, the D201GLY2 did very well. Web browsing with Firefox 3 was a good experience. Even fairly “rich” web pages with plenty of active content came into place quickly and worked reasonably smoothly.

Having no complaints with the basics, I pushed the board a little harder with iTunes, Google Earth and DVD video playback (after I'd found my external USB 2.0/Firewire DVD±RW drive). DVD playback worked perfectly using the VideoLAN project's VLC Media Player software. I noticed no problems with sound synchronization or stability, and the video playback was very smooth as well.

iTunes worked just about perfectly as well. Or rather, its music playback functionality worked perfectly. The visualizer was clearly pushing it a bit, although cover flow worked in a passable fashion.

Google Earth was asking a bit much. Upon the first launch, I got a warning stating that I should use DirectX mode for the best results. I elected to ignore that warning (although previous SiS integrated video experiences dictated that I probably should have obeyed the warning) and got a screenful of garbage video. This was recoverable—it did make the system hard to use for a moment or two until Windows regained its wits. I then switched to the DirectX mode and something that actually looked like Google Earth appeared. The animation wasn't terribly smooth at the best of times, and any other activity on the system would cause a noticeable slowdown.

I never seem to get around to doing any benchmarks on these kinds of things, and that means I don't have any pretty bar graphs to post here.

In comparison to a cheap desktop computer (something that you can buy for $350 or so), this thing can hold its own for most any basic task you can think of. With only a 1.2GHz Celeron (said to be based on something in between the “Yonah” Core and Conroe Core 2 architecture) you can't expect that the system will be lightning fast when pushed (and it isn't) but neither is the Atom. In fact, I'd say the two processors are pretty close—close enough that some of the time you wouldn't know the difference without looking. The Celeron 200 part used on the D201GLY2 does not support hyperthreading or multiple cores, so if your software could make good use of those features, it would probably run faster on the Atom and D945GCLF combination.

For those who have a great interest in knowing, the Celeron 220 is specified as having a 19 watt TDP, as compared to the Atom's 4 watt TDP. So it does use more power, while the chipset quite possibly uses a lot less than the power hungry 945 Express.

The processor itself supports the NX bit and EM64T (x86-64) technology, so if you want to run a 64-bit operating system—just like the Atom on the D945GCLF—you can. There are no virtualization extensions to be found, but it should be able to manage virtualization done strictly in software (though I wouldn't recommend it).

I used Windows XP Pro SP3 on this board, and I would strongly suggest that anyone planning to buy this board confine themselves to using XP or a version of Linux for the best result. Windows Vista is right on the line of being usable with 1GB of RAM, so I would not recommend using it for anything other than the most minimal needs.

So Why Would You Buy This Board and Processor?

I can think of one reason. The Atom CPU/board combination is—almost in every respect—the more capable part. But where you have to take the D945GCLF board with its Intel chipset and required northbridge fan, the D201GLY2 is supposedly available in a completely passively cooled configuration. If you want or need a totally silent computer, the D201GLY2 in its fanless configuration “could” be used. (That's not to say Intel's fan choice is loud. It definitely isn't. It does make some noise and may make more as it ages.)

I say “could” because I have not seen much availability of the D201GLY2 in the fan based "A" configuration. I have seen none of the passively cooled variant offered for sale. I'm sure that someone, somewhere can get them. And perhaps one of the fan-based boards could be converted by replacing the fan with a passive heatsink from a scrap parts box or by having one specially machined to fit the board. This is left as an exercise to the reader.

I also want to mention that I think it would be a prudent move for Intel to investigate bulding a version of the Atom-based board with the SiS chipset used on this board. Then it would be possible to have a completely or nearly silent system with a faster clock speed, hyperthreading support and (eventually—coming with the D945GCLF2) multiple cores. The power consumption of such a board would almost certainly drop as well, which could only be a good thing. The smaller heatsink used on the Atom would also help if what you want to build is an ultra low profile desktop computer or home theatre component.

So, if you want a cheap board with a cheap processor from a reputable name (instead of a not necessarily bad but nameless “yum cha*” product) and the option for completely passive cooling, the D201GLY2 might just be the thing for you. If you can find one...

Copyright ©2008 William R. Walsh. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to reproduce this work in its entirety with all copyright notices intact. No fee may be charged for access to this information, other than to cover any duplicating, media, or connect-time costs. Portions of this work may be used for other projects, provided credit is given for the portions of this work that you use and that such works are for non-profit distribution or information purposes. 

*No, I'm not from Down Under, but I found the phrase interesting and even managed to get it on this page.