Atom D510 with 4 GB RAM? All usable in OS?

[CuriousMike]

fjodor,
I'm actually very curious about this as well.

My wifes old mobo blew up a few weeks back, and I bought her the Intel 330 945 board.

She's a moderately heavy Firefox user ( compared to me ), where she'll have ~10-12 individual windows open.

At times, the responsiveness switching windows ( or opening another ) is pretty bad... like 3-5+ second weird delays that her old X2 5200+ never had.

Getting a little giddy about low power, I purchased a D510 mobo to put in my fileserver, but I'm considering swapping it into the wifes machine if it's faster. Reviews say it is but probably not noticeable enough for my case.

 

[Fjodor2001]

Well, it's always hard to say whether or not a system is considered 'snappy' or 'smooth', since it's to a large degree a personal opinion. In my case, I use it as a file server / uTorrent download server etc, and so far it works fine. I'm actually only having 2 GB RAM in it at the moment. I temporarily used the 2 x 2GB RAMs from one of my desktop computers to see if all of it would be available in the OS. But since the system seems to run fine on 2 GB RAM I put the additional 2 GB back in my desktop computer. I guess 4 GB RAM could be useful for some though, depending on the use case.

Anyway, I'm running Windows 7 on it at the moment, with one 2 TB Samsung 5400 RPM HD. I've ran som early tests on it and I got ~100 MB/s transfer speed when transferring one large 4 GB file over a Gigabit network between the D510 server and a desktop computer, and then the CPU load was only about 20 % on the D510. I.e. it was basically maxing out the Gigabit bandwith available (and the HDs as well). Transferring a large number of smaller files were *a lot* slower, it took ~10-15 minutes to move 30.000 files with a total size of 3.2 GB. However, the bottleneck was not likely the Atom D510 CPU as its load was less than 5-10% during that operation.

As for running the D510 as a desktop computer, it is obviously *a lot* slower than my C2D E6600 / 6GB RAM with an nVidia 7600GS GFX card that I mainly compare it to. The D510 doesn't feel as 'snappy' or responsive either. However, if not used very frequently and only for surfing the web or checking e-mail the D510 might suffice, although be prepared to become frustrated if you're used to a faster computer (as always!). I would definitely consider a system based on e.g. a Core i3-530 with 4 GB RAM instead. It will probably be a lot faster, and there are Mini-ITX motherboards available for Core i3-530 as well. It's also very low power, and pretty cheap (although not nearly as cheap as the D510 of course).

 

[betasub]

I'm glad you were able to answer your own question, although it's somewhat hypothetical now that you've found it runs just fine with only 2GB, LOL.

An earlier reply did question whether you needed the extra RAM - for Win7 and file server / p2p torrent services 2GB should be plenty. Having a gazillon documents or browsers open would definitely benefit from the extra RAM, but that's moving from "light server" duty to "productivity/workstation" duty.

 

[CuriousMike]

Is there a media player that would be most effective with this processor?

i.e., I'm using VLC but I'm wondering if there's another player that might use less CPU to play the same media ?