Intel Atom C2750 Motherboard Comparison

In my last post I did an overview and comparison of the Intel Atom C2750 CPU. If you missed it, you may want to go back and give it a read. Don't worry, I'll wait here for you to return ... Back? Great! Today, I'm taking a look at some motherboards with this CPU embedded as well as a system build spec using one of these boards.

I love the Mini-ITX form factor. It started out with boards for very low end CPUs and has progressed to where today you can get boards for full-power desktop and server CPUs. Intel's new Atom server chips were designed specifically with this form factor in mind.

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Links to Amazon products in this article are affiliate links.

The first boards to come to market featuring this chip are from ASRock and SUPERMICRO - each of which have their own unique set of features & specifications. It's not unusual to find boards from different manufacturers to be almost like "clones" of each other, but that is definitely NOT the case here.

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Intel Atom C2750 CPU Overview & Comparison

When the average person thinks about advances in computer processors, the general consensus is that faster is better. That makes sense right? Faster computers are better! If you talk to anyone who has ever worked in a data center though, they may have a somewhat different opinion.

Enterprise computing admins care about performance, absolutely, but they also often care about how much performance they get per watt of electricity used. Electricity costs money, especially when it's on data center scales - then there's the heat that servers generate and the amount of cooling you need to keep them running. The costs start to add up quickly.

Disclosure:
Links to Amazon products in this article are affiliate links.

Even small businesses can benefit from a power efficient server. There are cases where cloud based servers aren't appropriate for the application at hand, and a "traditional" server can be extremely noisy in a small office. One solution to this problem might be to use a desktop PC in a server role. What if, though, you could have a system that was designed to be a server but is just as quiet as a desktop PC and is even more energy efficient?

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Setup Secure Chromebook To Linux VNC Connections

I love my Chromebook! Since I got it back in November, I've found a wealth of great cloud based apps. However, sometimes I wish I could have access to the software and files on my Linux desktop PC without having to sit at my desk or I don't have an acceptable free cloud based app to perform a certain task.

With this in mind, I went looking for a way to remote into my Linux desktop. Chrome Remote Desktop isn't an option because it requires someone to be sitting at the remote computer to grant access to it. If I'm working from somewhere other than home, this isn't an option. My next thought was that there’s an excellent VNC client available for Chrome from RealVNC, so why not setup a VNC server?

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