DFI Hybrid Motherboard HD Video Preview

[MODEL3]

http://www.tweaktown.com/artic...ms_one_mobo/index.html

Today DFI invited us to its Taipei county headquarters to have an exclusive look at a very cool, upcoming motherboard from the company who is always willing to try sometimes radical new designs with its products

What we got a look at today was a pre-production version of the Hybrid P45-ION-T2A2 motherboard. At first, we didn?t know exactly what to expect, when DFI called and asked us to come and visit and see its "hybrid motherboard". We know the term in modern times from cars and most things green, but when the word is added before motherboard, it really did get us thinking exactly what we should expect and what we would be getting a look at on our visit.

It turned out that DFI created a totally unique motherboard design that actually allows for two systems to run shared (KVM style) or fully independent of each other, on the one single board.

The left side of the system is built up of the components for the NVIDIA ION and Intel Atom platform. This part could be used as a low-power file server or torrent downloading system or even Blu-ray movie playback. And the right side of the board features the parts seen on a traditional P45 + Socket 775 CPU motherboard, which could be used for gaming, video editing or other intensive applications.

MSRP $399

 

[VirtualLarry]

Wow, that is like the coolest thing ever.

I want one. The only issue for me is price. You can get seperate P45 and Atom mobos for cheaper. Then again, you do get a lot of features on this board, and as the engineer mentioned, you can also run it as two seperate systems (two keyboards/mice/monitors) if you wanted to, so I'm sure that the space savings will be attractive to some people.

I keep one of my systems running 24/7 for using MagicJack, so something like this would definately help my power bill.

I wonder about the two DVI ports on the back, are those both hooked up to the Atom? Because the P45 doesn't have onboard video at all. So all three video outs are from Atom?
That doesn't make sense either, because what happens if you install a video card into the P45? I don't see how they can integrate that into the KVM feature.

Also, what about the SATA ports? Does the Atom have seperate SATA ports? If so, does that mean that you need to install 2X HDs and 2X DVD burners into your case?

I guess this design still has some limitations to it.

 

[fzkl]

If only they had a P55 + ION Version!

 

[PCTC2]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Wow, that is like the coolest thing ever.

I want one. The only issue for me is price. You can get seperate P45 and Atom mobos for cheaper. Then again, you do get a lot of features on this board, and as the engineer mentioned, you can also run it as two seperate systems (two keyboards/mice/monitors) if you wanted to, so I'm sure that the space savings will be attractive to some people.

I keep one of my systems running 24/7 for using MagicJack, so something like this would definately help my power bill.

I wonder about the two DVI ports on the back, are those both hooked up to the Atom? Because the P45 doesn't have onboard video at all. So all three video outs are from Atom?
That doesn't make sense either, because what happens if you install a video card into the P45? I don't see how they can integrate that into the KVM feature.

Also, what about the SATA ports? Does the Atom have seperate SATA ports? If so, does that mean that you need to install 2X HDs and 2X DVD burners into your case?

I guess this design still has some limitations to it.

VL, the two DVI ports are the built-in KVM. If you look closely, the graphics card on the video demo goes from the video card to one of the DVI and then from the other DVI to the projector. The HDMI is ION only.

The systems have separate SATA ports so you will need separate HDDs and opticals. There are two HDDs on the desk in the video demo.

The left USB are shared for HID KVM. The LANs are bridged and the audio is over the KVM.

But if you had two monitors, keyboards, and mice, then one goes in the HDMI and the other can bypass the KVM altogether and plug directly from the graphics card for the P45 to a monitor, and use the dedicated USB ports and you can run both systems simultaneously without KVM from a single case.

I like this because I could run my virtualization from the P45 with a Q9550 and then run the web/NAS/AD from the ION.

 

[Griswold]

The 30W idle draw of the Atom part isnt spectacular. Some Ion boards stay under 30W under load...

But besides poor optimization, its a nifty idea.

 

[Binky]

Whoa, that's a very interesting concept. I could see running an Asterisk server (free google voice phone) on the Ion and my main rig on the P45 side. I'm currently doing the same thing with a VMware virtual server. Very clever.

 

[VirtualLarry]

The other question I have is, what about the power to the HDs? I assume that the system PSU stays on all the time, unless both systems are off. The reason I think this is, the Atom+ION gets it's power from a high-efficiency brick, but the HD power for both systems comes from the main PSU. If you were to turn off the P45, and it turned off the PSU, then the HD that the Atom+ION was using would turn off too. Not a good idea.

So it seems like the system PSU stays on all the time, which could affect the overall power draw too.