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Review: Intel's Pentium-M 735 Processor and DFI 855GME Motherboard

by Ryszard Sommefeldt on 31 March 2005, 00:00

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), DFI (TPE:2397)

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Pictures

Just a few pictures, before I move on to the graphs. Take one µPGA479 socket on a DFI 855GME mainboard.

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Add a Dothan-core processor and screw-lock it in place.

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Adorn it with the supplied processor cooler that's not much bigger than the passive sink for the northbridge, and plug in the fan.

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Et voila, mon amis.

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DFI's 855GME-MGF µATX mainboard for µPGA479 Pentium-M

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You can see the 855GME passively cooled, the socket for the processor, two DDR memory slots supporting DDR333 maximum, connected to a single-channel memory controller, the 6300ESB I/O processor, AGP4X slot, a pair of regular PCI Conventional slots and a single PCI-X slot. There's a couple of SATA ports, poorly placed, ACL655 audio CODEC connected to the 6300EB, a GigE full ASIC (Realtek 8110S) and a VT6307 providing a single FireWire400 port.

It's hard to figure out who the mainboard is aimed at, based on the feature set and small µATX mainboard. That sounds counter-intuitive, I know, since it's one of the only Pentium-M desktop mainboards available, but it's going to take a little while longer to nail down just who they're pitching the boards to and what feature set and form-factor to choose.

Finally, the board only needs a 20-pin ATX power connector and nothing else. The supplied heatsink for the processor is small (barely bigger than the CPU package it sits atop), quiet (despite the 40mm fan) and with passive heatsinks for both bridges, the scope for making quiet, powerful systems using Pentium-M is obvious.