megatron-uk wrote on 2021-03-09, 09:19:
RM, after their early years making their own systems didn't often produce their own equipment. Certainly by the time we were in the P2/P3/P4/Core generation they were rebranding mostly OEM boards from (usually) Intel and Asus.
The university I work at used to buy thousands of these things in the early 2000's and they were some of the cheapest beige-box rubbish you could get. The quality control was atrocious; I remember around 2004 several batches of their systems (as in dozens at a time) arriving with free viruses (blaster worm, I believe) embedded in the pre-loaded Windows XP image... it had clearly gotten in to the master image they were imaging all shipped devices with.
That is an interesting background story. Those infected OS images are inexcusable.
Strange choice for RM to supply "mobile on desktop" systems. Mobile on desktop was not very common, from the consumer brands I only found AOpen advertising them, with their "MoDt" series.
I do recommend this "i45GMt-HR ecoquiet 300" for those who wants to mess around with Socket P processors. The connectors are practical and the CPU support is among the best. The four CPU heat-sink connector holes have fixed threaded bushings, so I did make sure to get the original heat-sink as well. This particular board has not been damaged by evil British school kids, only that the DVI port looks very worn. But I have no intention of doing anything with intel GMA graphics.
The more luxurious socket P processors are very nice IMHO. They even sold Quad cores for it with a whopping 12MB L2 cache. Cherry picked mobiles for lower voltage use. Note that there is not much x64 use for them. Practically you are limited to 2x2GB SODIMMs. (Theoretically 8GB DDR2 or DDR3 combinations are possible, but practically not really.)
Almoststew1990 wrote on 2021-03-09, 12:17:
Whilst this board is long gone a year or so ago, by coincidence I bought a similar board - Aopen i945GMm-HL. This is MATX and has a few extra slots, but it 's socket M and is limited to the early Core 2 Duo's and comes with a T2300. These CPUs are also a lot harder to come by it seems!
You found the ITX format too small maybe?
That mATX one is also a nice board. Exactly like an AOpen i945GTm-VHL that I once considered. Supposedly there is a minor difference in chipset between those two.
Many Socket M CPUs are OK I suppose, but the top list is obviously a set of just four: T7200 / T7400 / T7600 / T7600G. These are the 4MB Cache Merom cores. The T7200 should not be that difficult to find, or expensive. I have a T5600 and T7200 myself.
I have no T2300 for socket M, but do have a T2330 ES for socket P. It is a 533MHz FSB model. This FSB speed is too low for the motherboard, so I had to insulate CPU pin BSEL1 to test it (at 667MHz FSB).
If you ever feel like combining the more modern socket P with the mATX format: There are Asus Pegatron IMISR-VM boards on offer as well. Though i read it requires a modded BIOS to run some of the later mobiles. Edit: Again this was sold by RM, as Ecoquiet 965. Has GM965 chipset and therefor maximum FSB is 800Mhz.