Intel has officially begun shipping a 45nm dual-core Intel Dual Core Atom Processor known as Atom 330.
Atom 330 is designed specifically for nettops, which are affordable desktops purpose-built primarily for web surfing, email, and basic Internet usage.
The dual-core Atom 330 features a 1.6GHz processing core, 1MB of level 2 cache, an 8W TDP and support for DDR2 667MHz.
The new processor is available as an integrated package and has been validated with the Intel 945GC Express Chipset, featuring built-in Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 and Intel High Definition Audio.
Guru3D had its hands on the ECS Motherboard (ECS P45GC) packing with dual core Atom 330 (945GC express chipset.
One good thing of these mainboards including Atom 330 CPUs are budget ones and really affordable for everybody. They only cost about $75- $99 USD. Atom 330 is capable to run
The writer thinks that “two is always better than one.” He also thinks that “it's not at all high-end, but definitely interesting and fast enough as a low-level desktop or Net PC to browse the web listen to music or even watch a DVD.”
So, if you use your PC for normal PC use, by spending about $200 USD (you will require to add memory, PSU, HDD, chassis and etc to your PC) you will have a good performance nettop with an affordable price.
One problem with this mainboard comes with mere one Single-channel DDR2 memory slot that supports up to 2GB.
The writer has done several tests such as ZLib CPU test, Memory test, SiSoftware DhryStone CPU test and HD Tach 3.0.4.0 on three CPUS including Atom 330, Athlon X2 4850 and Phenom 9850 and compared the results.
ZLib CPU test measures combined CPU and memory subsystem performance. In this test the distance between Atom 330 and Athlon X2 4850 is not so much. While Atom 330 scores 16014 kb/sec, Athlon X2 4850 scores 28592 KB/sec. It is nice to see that Phenom 9850 scored (66232Kb/sec) much better than the last two ones.
You can see the total benchmark result in the original article.
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