I tried it with a zotac ion atom 230 system, 2gb ram. It’s theoretically plenty powerful. It ended up running opensuse as my home workstation instead with it’s nice built in nvidia graphics and DVI out and a little more RAM. This was about 30-50 days ago. I put a ocz ssd in it for workstation use.
With RouterOS, I could not get the current version of netinstall at the time to be able to install routerOS on a USB stick. I tried the 4.5b-something version and it wouldn’t properly install 3.30 or 4.5. I was hoping for something efficient where I could just move the USB stick to another computer for testing. It would apparently install, but not boot, unless it was a bad install? I was using an Aspire-1 netbook with XP to do the netinstall.
It was similar money to the Atom system, but several times faster. It uses 50w of electricity idling and 70w under load, which I consider reasonable. A little more electricity than the Atom, but the company is paying for it where it’s installed.
Saving 30 watts saves me $40/yr for electricity, and probably $20/yr for airconditioning electricity. All my electric bills add up to about $2k/month, so I conserve electricity whenever possible.
At remote sites, I tend to use RBs as they are more power efficient than normal PC hardware.
Newer PCs tend to be pretty reliable and easy to find parts for too. Good luck finding matching PC100 sdram for a pIII router if you ever want to upgrade or anything. In a year or two, you won’t be able to even move a working IDE hard drive into new PC hardware.
according to the wiki
the atom family is much lower consumption than the pentium family. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation
Pentium III 800 Coppermine (180 nm) 800 MHz 27.2 W or 26.4 W 34 (27.2 W), 33 (26.4 W)
Pentium III 800EB Coppermine (180 nm) 800 MHz 29.05 W, 27.2 W or 26.4 W 36.31 (29.05 W), 34 (27.2 W), 33 (26.4 W)
Atom 230 Diamondville (45 nm) 1.6 GHz 4 W 2.50
Atom 330 Diamondville (45 nm) 1.6 GHz 8 W 5.00 [2.50 Per Core]