Finally finished the build of my lEi KINO Mini ITX firewall box, it has 1.6Ghz CPU, 1GB Ram, 80GB Sata HDD, and DVD drive, Dual Gigabit Ethernet ports onboard (hence firewall), passively cooled (so very quiet), along with a 250W PSU.
I stuck Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (see http://www.ubuntu.com ) on it as my firewall OS running the Firestarter firewall software which allows for Internet connection sharing to your network very easily, all of which it runs happily without any problem. You could almost use this system as a desktop workstation PC for light work such as email and Word Processing!
I originally tried booting up and using the system using my standard fallback firewall OS of Puppy Linux ( see http://puppylinux.org ) as this runs entirely from a live CD, I just leave it in the DVD drive for when problems happen so I can just load it up and carry on working. Puppy is even more light weight than Ubuntu, and ran very quickly on this setup without any problems!
I took a peek at the System Monitor to see what was going on there too, and the CPU shows up as a dual core core under Ubuntu!
Motherboard Details can be found here – http://www.ieiworld.com/product_groups/industrial/content.aspx?gid=00001000010000000002&cid=08133752007657537117&id=08274601939847120321
Graphics Card Details;
VGA integrated in Intel 945GSE
Support HDTV resolution up to 1080i by component interface
18-bit dual-channel LVDS by Intel® 945GSE
DVI-D support by silcon image Sil1362
Intel® Atom™ Processor N270 with Mobile Intel® 945GSE Express Chipset
The single-core processor based on 45 nm technology, at 1.6 GHz core speed and 2.5 W thermal design power, is power-optimized to deliver robust performance per watt. This platform offers rich I/O capabilities, 32-bit 3-D graphics, and DDR2 support.
- Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology: Increases system responsiveness in multitasking environments
- Power optimized: Supports Enhanced Intel SpeedStep® Technology, low-power sleep states (C1E, C2E, C4E), and dynamic L2 cache sizing
- Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (Intel® SSE2) and Intel SSE3: Enables data processing in complex arithmetic/video decoding
I did read somewhere too that this system has driver support for Windows Vista too, though I can only imagine that would be much slower than Ubuntu!