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Already exists, it's called OpenUPS and NUC-UPS. In fact OpenUPS is pretty close to what ekr is proposing, only it already exists as a finished product. Guess he didn't do much Googling before he came up with his one...

Already exists, it's called OpenUPS and NUC-UPS. In fact OpenUPS is pretty close to what ekr is proposing, only it already exists as a finished product. Guess he didn't do much Googling before he came up with his one...

Already exists, it's called OpenUPS and NUC-UPS. In fact OpenUPS is pretty close to what ekr is proposing, only it already exists as a finished product. Guess he didn't do much Googling before he came up with his one...

There's already a product that does this, it's been around for years. Actually there are lots and lots of things like this out there.

The killer isn't designing the thing, that's relatively straightforward ("relatively" meaning you need a couple of experienced EEs, 6-12 months, and $50K or so to get the kinks worked out). What's not straightforward is getting it manufactured in quantity and UL rated. Open source works OK for software where the "manufacturing" cost is zero and there's no need for any safety certification, but less well for anything else.

But I wonder, why are you trying to cram so much into a such a small space?

The ECS KAM1-I AM1 mini-ITX motherboard has two serial ports and headers for two more serial ports, which made it perfect as a Red Hat Linux terminal server for my Cisco certification rack. I got the motherboard and AMD AM1 processor for $25 each last year. The mATX case that I had was overkill and I wanted something smaller. The Cougar case for $50 was perfect. I'll probably replace the PSU with a picoPSU to free up space inside.

This one is somewhat well known too, a bit overpowered but with protection features if you use it in an actual car

http://www.mini-box.com/M2-ATX...

Wow, I'm seeing there are others / new ones in the Pico PSU form factor too. i.e. some have wide input voltage range and thus built-in converter/regulator (because your battery will go 13V, 12V, 11V, 10V...), others just say "input 12V" and are made with a power brick or laptop PSU plugged to the mains in mind.

i.e., to be 100% specific : this one is specifically advertised for running from a car battery or in a car (or in a truck), where a "picoPSU-90" at half the price is not. (I will suppose the picoPSU-90 is exactly what's needed if you have very clean and close to 12V power to start with)
http://www.mini-box.com/M3-ATX...

This is funny too : http://www.mini-box.com/DCDC-U...
garbage input in (random vehicle's 12V or 24V), stable DC voltage of your choosing out (5V to 24V)

This a mini ITX motherboard with DC 19V in! (meant to be used with 19V laptop PSU, or can be used with power "conditioned" with a thing like the one above)
http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/A...

a bit more power hungry than an Atom system (cheap Celeron/Pentium soldered systems are rebranded Atom. sic)

Although, if you choose the right Pico PSU or similar, motherboards with only ATX power input will do.

This one is somewhat well known too, a bit overpowered but with protection features if you use it in an actual car

http://www.mini-box.com/M2-ATX...

Wow, I'm seeing there are others / new ones in the Pico PSU form factor too. i.e. some have wide input voltage range and thus built-in converter/regulator (because your battery will go 13V, 12V, 11V, 10V...), others just say "input 12V" and are made with a power brick or laptop PSU plugged to the mains in mind.

i.e., to be 100% specific : this one is specifically advertised for running from a car battery or in a car (or in a truck), where a "picoPSU-90" at half the price is not. (I will suppose the picoPSU-90 is exactly what's needed if you have very clean and close to 12V power to start with)
http://www.mini-box.com/M3-ATX...

This is funny too : http://www.mini-box.com/DCDC-U...
garbage input in (random vehicle's 12V or 24V), stable DC voltage of your choosing out (5V to 24V)

This a mini ITX motherboard with DC 19V in! (meant to be used with 19V laptop PSU, or can be used with power "conditioned" with a thing like the one above)
http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/A...

a bit more power hungry than an Atom system (cheap Celeron/Pentium soldered systems are rebranded Atom. sic)

Although, if you choose the right Pico PSU or similar, motherboards with only ATX power input will do.

This one is somewhat well known too, a bit overpowered but with protection features if you use it in an actual car

http://www.mini-box.com/M2-ATX...

Wow, I'm seeing there are others / new ones in the Pico PSU form factor too. i.e. some have wide input voltage range and thus built-in converter/regulator (because your battery will go 13V, 12V, 11V, 10V...), others just say "input 12V" and are made with a power brick or laptop PSU plugged to the mains in mind.

i.e., to be 100% specific : this one is specifically advertised for running from a car battery or in a car (or in a truck), where a "picoPSU-90" at half the price is not. (I will suppose the picoPSU-90 is exactly what's needed if you have very clean and close to 12V power to start with)
http://www.mini-box.com/M3-ATX...

This is funny too : http://www.mini-box.com/DCDC-U...
garbage input in (random vehicle's 12V or 24V), stable DC voltage of your choosing out (5V to 24V)

This a mini ITX motherboard with DC 19V in! (meant to be used with 19V laptop PSU, or can be used with power "conditioned" with a thing like the one above)
http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/A...

a bit more power hungry than an Atom system (cheap Celeron/Pentium soldered systems are rebranded Atom. sic)

Although, if you choose the right Pico PSU or similar, motherboards with only ATX power input will do.

Either way, if he's looking for battery powered, neither are gonna cut it... it's either tablet, laptop, or a board that goes with mobile CPU like Intel Atom X5 series.

If you're going with a traditional motherboard, a PicoPSU will take a 12V DC input from batteries.

http://www.mini-box.com/s.nl/sc.8/category.13/it.C/.f

As I use solar and already have DC available at home, I'm curious if I might be able to find DC power supplies.

Yes, assuming you want to take an ATX PSU, there are DC options available to you.

Well, obviously there are plenty of other options, but given the subject of discussion, I figure ATX is the most likely interest.

If you're serious, you can do it. If you don't care, well, others will do it anyway.

I dug into building my own when I wanted more control over DNS servers but didn't want to run that in a VM or have a large dedicated machine. I eventually had it take over DHCP services too.

http://www.pcengines.ch/apu.ht...

US Vendor

http://www.mini-box.com/

Works real well with BSD and it even has WiFi in the box I built.

Something like this should allow you to run a small desktop, and most laptops just need 19vdc. I'm not sure what you could do about the microwave, but if electricity is in short supply cooking with it seems like a waste.

I just went through this and here's the short summary of my research. DIY - go with a PC Engines Alix board or a Soekris board if Intel NICs matter to you. You can buy them here (link below). Install PFSense. Done. Easy. Or if you want a more command line approach install VyOS. https://soekris.com/ http://www.mini-box.com/ALIX-b... https://www.pfsense.org/ http://vyos.net/wiki/Main_Page If you want an off the shelf solution the best product I've found for the money is by Ubiquiti Networks called Edge Router lite. http://www.ubnt.com/edgemax/ed... As far as VPN acceleration. With the Alix or the Soekris you can have a dedicated Crypto Accelerator. I haven't gotten to the VPN portion of my build yet. It only really matters if you need fast sustained throughput on a point to point IPSEC. If you are just connecting from remote software decoding will probably be fine. PFsense has OpenVPN included and makes this easy. VyOS or another route will require more hands on.

Alix3d3 here goes for about $125. Specs lower than the pi for cpu and ram but it does seem like a potent board.

http://www.mini-box.com/Alix-3...

Check out Mini Box.com for build it yourself solutions. It will cost a bit more initially, but you gain the ability to run any software you desire. I used DD-WRT for years but it doesn't seem to be well maintained anymore. Ditto OpenWRT. Interest in hacking consumer routers appears to have run it's course. Personally I run bind and isc-dhcp inside my network and I use a third party DNS provider instead of my ISP's questionable DNS service.

I'm thinking an Alix board might be a better solution if you are looking at a R Pi as a possible solution. It costs more sure but it comes with all of the features you need (LAN/WAN port, WiFi) built in.

If you're not trying to play big badass games you can build a low-power PC and power it with something like a PicoPSU, that one will do 160W sustained. Then you can build your own UPS trivially using a car battery and charger. Put the computer against an external wall and run power through it to deal with venting issues. It just sucks to have the power go out when you're in the middle of something. Or, of course, use a cheap inverter. I would have done this already but both my battery chargers are manual, they never stop charging. I suppose it would be fairly easy to build a circuit to do monitoring and to switch the charger using an Arduino or MSP.

The PC case really has not changed significantly since the 1980s, since everyone figured out that separate keyboards are better than integrated ones

Only if your definition of "change" is so wide-open that you only care if the SHAPE is different.

Yes, they've all been rectangles since the 80s, but there have been more significant changes in that time. AT's toggle switch gave way to ATX's push-button, and smaller size. MicroATX allows everything to be significantly smaller, to the point that you can mount your computer to the back of your monitor.

Full-height PCI is giving way to half-height cards wherever possible, and smaller cases that are still fully capable are the result. SSDs are shrinking HDD sizes, and smaller cases with fewer fans results.

If anything, cases are changing too fast for companies to keep-up and put them into a standard... Instead, they just keep the screw holes in the same places, and tell you some boards won't fit...

What the hell computer configured as a _home router_ uses a hundred watts? When I got tired of a clunking old P4 using 75W, I bought a new set of parts from minibox and now have a gateway router that uses a whole 20W, for under $250.

Why use an inverter at all? Your battery is DC. Your alternator, through rectifiers, outputs DC. Get a computer with a DC power supply. There is no point in converting everything from DC to AC to DC again. Of course, you may have difficulty finding a decent monitor with a DC power supply, but they do exist. I really like the website Mini-box when I'm building my mini-ITX boxes. In fact, I have a mini-ITX box I use as a server w/ a Core i-3 and no fans. The thing pulls only 20W or so, and runs at about 35C in an air conditioned home. If I were to build a car-puter I would definitely use their stuff.

I have done a similar project before. From my experience a very good resource for information is Mp3Car. There are a lot of projects with pictures. People over there is very helpful on this matter.

There are many solutions to powering your computers I have used DC-DC power adapter that transforms 12v to ATX compatible power (M4-ATX). It take of engine cranks and any voltage variation. A good place to buy parts is Mini Box they have a car computing section.

From here?

Not sure what your taste in cases is but I found this one and thought it looked pretty clean and functional. http://www.mini-box.com/M350-universal-mini-itx-enclosure

I will second both points of this. Using buildroot for multiple types of boards/chips. buildroot helps in creating a reproducible toolchain, kernel, apps, and filesystem images. You can add your own application (The main thing to run) as a custom package.
http://buildroot.uclibc.org/

The Atmel at91sam9 series runs fine. Both in graphical and non-graphical environment. I use this for quick proto type testing/dev:
http://www.mini-box.com/pico-SAM9G45-X
(however, I add NAND Flash for os/apps)

As others have stated, Angstrom is also good for building the OS/applications. The build system takes a little bit more care to setup than buildroot.
http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/

Ah, completely forgot... I also have a fanless Atom 330 based board with four SATA ports. That one was expensive (well, compared to the Intel D510MO). It was being used for another purpose when I was building my parents server. Again, you won't get it 100% silent because of the disks. For the power supply, you'd be able to take something like PicoPSU, I think...

Technically you could swap out power supplies for a DC input version:
http://www.powerstream.com/DC-PC-12V.htm
and
http://www.mini-box.com/DC-DC (these are more for low power systems though)

I had debated putting a 12vdc power supply in my home computer and running it to a 12v battery with a power/charging circuit on that. I never understood having UPS systems that convert AC to DC to charge the batteries then switching back to AC to power the computer which just converts it back to DC.

and sometime you just need one of these (when they are back in stock): http://www.mini-box.com/pico-SAM9G45-X

Why not just use the minimal install option? This turns the unit into an XBMC appliance, so there isn't an OS for the end user to deal with.

I actually put this on a CF card with a CF to IDE converter. I use the PicoPSU-120 power supply and I removed all the fans on the mobo and cards with large heat sinks. It's completely silent. However, I only use mine for music so I don't have any large graphics cards, but I'm pretty sure you can get fanless cards capable of 1080p since I have a fanless one in my desktop that runs at WQXGA.

If you are thinking about this for your home, think about the cost of power. I bet that G5 sucks a lot of AC juice. And most likely this is at the highest tier of your power pricing. In the winter its not so bad because it heats the house, but in the summer if you live in an area where air conditioning is not just nice but an essential then you have to suck that heat out.

Buy one of these atom mother boards like the one of the fanless mini-ATX mother boards, one of the PicoPSU DC-DC ATX power supplies that plugs into the ATX power socket, http://www.mini-box.com/picoPSU-80, and you have a system that would make a nice file server. Add one or two 2 Tb 3.5" drives if you need space or one or two 500 Mb 2.5" drives to save power. This would give you a nice file server that sips the juice. Would probably pay for it self in a year in power savings and it is good for the environment.

I switched my X86_64 desktop for a dual core atom a year ago and love how much cooler it runs. My office is in the attic and does not have air conditioning or a window so heat is a big issue for me. I run Linux on the desktop and do browsing, email, text editing and the performance is acceptable. Sort of like the first dual core 32 bit systems. It is not a gaming system, but I am not a gamer.

Go green, use low power computers and save the environment.

RLH

Now they'll have to resort to a inverter.

Or, you know, they can use Mini-ITX with a M3-ATX-HV or similar.

I have one of these on my desk:
http://www.mini-box.com/M350-universal-mini-itx-enclosure

You'd need to throw in an external optical drive, but then you could get whatever you wanted.

Intel Atom D510: Pine Trail Boosts Performance, Cuts Power Looking for the price of this board on the internet I found it at http://www.mini-box.com/D510MO-mini-ITX-Intel, and the price is not bad :). With a proper miniITX enclosure and Broadcom Cristal HD miniPCI card it would be a nice fanless and silent HTPC for my living room.

• WIFI Card
• HDMI Out
• Optical Audio Out
• VGA Out / DVI Out

Slap it in a vesa mounted cheap case with a laptop hard drive and I'm done.

My whole media system will be under $300, vesa mounted to the back of my TV and controlled with my existing ATI/X10 Media remote.
All my cds/dvds have been backed up to my file server which has mountable network shares for XBMC to use.

Long live XBMC!

• WIFI Card
• HDMI Out
• Optical Audio Out
• VGA Out / DVI Out

Slap it in a vesa mounted cheap case with a laptop hard drive and I'm done.

My whole media system will be under $300, vesa mounted to the back of my TV and controlled with my existing ATI/X10 Media remote.
All my cds/dvds have been backed up to my file server which has mountable network shares for XBMC to use.

Long live XBMC!

• WIFI Card
• HDMI Out
• Optical Audio Out
• VGA Out / DVI Out

Slap it in a vesa mounted cheap case with a laptop hard drive and I'm done.

My whole media system will be under $300, vesa mounted to the back of my TV and controlled with my existing ATI/X10 Media remote.
All my cds/dvds have been backed up to my file server which has mountable network shares for XBMC to use.

Long live XBMC!

Measure the power with a Kill-a-Watt

The published power specs are usually some absurdly borderline absolute maximum power supply capability and are not even close to the actual power consumption.

For example, the Mac Mini I had (Core Duo with Intel video, not the very latest one with Nvidia 9400M) was nowhere near 85 watts - it idled at just about 20 watts. With the Nvidia, I would estimate no more than 25, 30 at the utmost; almost sure it will be closer to 25. And it will be idling 99.9% of the time with this kind of use. An Aopen Mini will do just as well, and is dead easy to install linux on, and at least as well designed. I measured mine (Core Duo with Intel video) at 20 watts idle. They now make fanless industrial Minis that consume even less power. I've been running a Pentium M mini-ITX 24x7 since 2004 for this type of service; again, it draws 20 watts. All of these systems are ridiculously quiet, make very low waste heat, and take up very little space if the keyboard/mouse/monitor are not connected (you control them over ssh from your notebook or desktop, you turn them on and off with the power button, which invokes a graceful shutdown via ACPI).

If you can find a well used 13-14" Pentium M or Core Duo notebook (preferably Intel video which is low power) with a busted display, and are able to install linux using the DB-15 video connector or serial port, you can have a nice system for low bucks. Once again, I have measured these systems idling with the backlight off, and they are right around 20 watts. The half decent ones will run a long time 24x7 if they are not stressed, because the fan is barely ticking over.

I'm looking into some of the ARM stuff now. It will be substantially less power and still capable of all these kinds of tasks. I should have this one Mini-2440 in a couple of days. It will probably idle below 1 watt with the LCD backlight off.

I use one of the older motherboards from VIA (VIA PC-1 PC2500 uses C7 CPU - FlexATX - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_pc-1_Initiative ) with a minibox M3ATX ( http://www.mini-box.com/M3-ATX-DC-DC-ATX-Automotive-Computer-car-PC-Power-Supply ) powersupply to run the whole system from battery (13.8V DC). The system uses a microdrive/SSD for booting with a standard Debian X86 install.

With 2G RAM power consumption is approximately 25W. It handles remote desktop, webserver, live multiple VOIP audio streams, ... with a lot of reserve power left. This is a remote unattended system (no physical access) - It has been running almost continuously for the past more than 2 years.

• Jetway Versa J7F4K1G2E (1.2Ghz C7, dual gigE) - $150
• M350 enclosure /w 60W adapter - $75
• 1GB DDR2-667 - $30
• 500GB 2.5" SATA hdd - $90

I get $345 ($405 if I use a 750GB hdd). I think a good low-power system with the right combination of features is hard to get for under $300 new.

Mini-box has an assortment of very small DC-DC ATX power supplies. Look for ones with "wide input" that can handle a range of voltages. I have used an older, slightly larger module on some battery powered robots to run a mini-ITX computer, and I've been quite happy with it.

Get an old computer and install smoothwall3.0 and then install the dansguardian mod for it http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=28154

If you don't have an old computer or want to save space then for about $150 you can get this small alix board plus case plus power supply: http://www.mini-box.com/Alix-2B0-Board-2-LAN-2-MINI-PCI_LX700_2

AMD has the Geode LX and NX lines.
Geode LX is very low powered and the highest clock speed (I've seen) is 566Mhz.
Geode NX is targeted directly at the Atom. Although I have yet to see any of these out in the wild.
I've only ever found a Geode in the wild clocked as high as 500Mhz (see the ALIX boards)

Actually the Geode is a dead end processor, AMD already has stated they are disconinuing it.

AMD recently announced a new processor "Conesus" that is intended for netbooks and UMPC.
http://gizmodo.com/5086703/amds-upcoming-conesus-netbook-chip-wont-stoop-to-mid-levels

For notebooks I have no idea how total system power usage looks, AMDs chipsets provide better integrated graphics than Intel do however. And I guess I would go for someone better though still crappy graphics when somewhat faster / more power efficient CPU (if Intel really is.)

In my experience Intel is dominating in the notebook business. I prefer AMD but the notebooks out there using them are either:
1) based on Sempron (slowish but low powered)
2) based on older X2 core (good performance but runs hot and sucks power)

Afaik AMD don't have an alternative to Atom, I may be wrong though.

AMD has the Geode LX and NX lines.
Geode LX is very low powered and the highest clock speed (I've seen) is 566Mhz.
Geode NX is targeted directly at the Atom. Although I have yet to see any of these out in the wild.
I've only ever found a Geode in the wild clocked as high as 500Mhz (see the ALIX boards)

I was thinking about making something just like this. Currently sitting on my desk, I have my laptop, 2 external hard drives, a wireless router, a USB hub, and a cell phone charger, some speakers, and an LED desk lamp (powered by another cell phone charger). Except for the speakers and the laptop, all these devices take 12V and/or 5V. I was thinking about getting a small ATX (or similar) power supply and adding some connectors for power. Then I would cut the proprietary end off each gadget's power supply and turn them into adapters for my "standard" connectors (.1" headers would probably work well). That way I could make a cord exactly as long as I need, and I only have to have one power cord plugged into my surge protector, instead of 3 wall-warts and 2 power cords. It would also make my desk neater since I wouldn't have bundles of coiled up cords that are longer than I need.

Here is the maximum power requirements of everything that runs at 12V or 5V. During normal use, I will never max out everything, so I could probably get away with a 120VAC to 12VDC power supply and a PicoPSU or something similar.
8A @ 5V; 40 watts
5A @ 12V; 60 watts

According to the article you posted, support for *nix is patchy:

According to the link for the product included in the article specs include:

* Linux drivers and OpenSource SDK

I'm no expert, but it sounds like at least Linux is supported (though for all I know, the drivers could be next to useless - I've never used them) - the article does a poor job of mentioning this

The thing that really confuses me about this device is this: USB 2.0 full speed device - if you send USB 2.0 full speed data (at full rate) at a display that only has 80 characters to display, it will be every bit as completely unreadable as a USB 1.0 display also being sent at full rate.

I think you're right that this is great for headerless servers as you wander around the server room - but some of non 1U servers (especially compaqs) used to have something similar built in (I don't know if they still do).

This would be great for a normal desktop computer so you can check for new emails, or have admin reports of how many of the servers are down, etc - that you can see without having to turn your monitor on, or to avoid having to remote / kvm to a management machine. That way, you don't have to interrupt your lunchtime WolfET!

Yup! I still have an Apple //e with a Rocket chip + 384kb ram and 20 MB hard drive (Conner) running Prodos and Mousedesk.

The RocketChip kicked ass...wish I hadn't sold mine when I upgraded my IIe to a IIGS, as I ended up snagging another IIe at a garage sale a few years later. The IIGS (in a IIe case, upgraded with a kit back in '92 or '93) is currently set up with 4.25 MB RAM, an 8-MHz ZipGS, and an Apple DMA SCSI card with a 4.3-GB Seagate Barracuda (it was cheap when I bought it, and the previous drive was getting flaky) and a 4x CD-ROM drive hanging off of it. It's connected to the LAN through a GatorBox CS, through which it can share files and get a limited amount of Internet access. I converted a microATX-type power supply (one of the really small ones you see in eMachines boxes) to power it; it easily runs fanless at the low load that's placed on it, but if I were to replace the stock power supply today, I'd combine a LittlePower with a picoPSU.

Another worthwhile observation: You can get the Atom motherboard. They're $83 delivered from Newegg. Via has a habit of announcing product and stalling. The are selling this cute little devil though. It's called the "pico-ITX" form factor.

The reviewed item though? Not yet. Until it's available we're comparing what's on the shelf to what's not. Of course the one that comes later is targeted at a slightly higher performance level. It seems likely that when it ships Intel could reply with a machine that has dual Dimms, PCIe X16, dual gigabit nics, and then up the ante with a little DVI goodness and dual core. Everybody knows the chipset supports those features already.

Maybe they'll also do a process shrink on the MCH as well to get the power down.

Personally I'll be getting both. I've played with the Atom board and I like it. These are both good enough boards for some purposes I have in mind and if more better stuff comes along later, well, that's just the way of IT isn't it? If you waited until nothing better was going to come out you might as well go back to pencil and paper.

It's not a laptop but they're available. My friend brought in an Intel Atom "desktop" motherboard today. 64 bit. Dual SATA. Two channels of IDE. Onboard video. Hyperthreading. Windows XP-64 bit ran just fine when he added his 1GB stick of DDR2. 1.6GHz. ESX wouldn't install easily. Ubuntu Hardy didn't support the onboard NIC (yet?). $83 delivered MB + CPU. We'll both be buying several more. We haven't tried Xen or other distros yet -- Intel gifted a platform specific one of course.

The CPU has no fan. It pulls a max of 2 1/2 Watts. Even with Folding@home running the CPU heatsink was to touch indistinguishable from ambient. I can't wait to swap the MCH cooler with a video card cooler on the low profile version, add a SDHC->IDE converter, sub the PSU for a Pico-PSU and see how small a box I can fit it in. It would make a great robotics controller, thin client or car backbone to support media playback, GPS apps, file and cellular wifi sharing and heavy browsing. There's a smaller form factor board you can use that fits in the box your playing cards came in but I don't feel like diddling with LVDS video and I don't need 'em that small. There's already a British hosting vendor leasing racks of these for cheap because the cost and power requirements are low. I guess that's so they can fill out the caverns left by their power sucking but very dense server->bladeserver project and because the thing is dirt cheap.

That's all the review I've got after one day. More later.

This is the platform the next billion users are going to use to join us on the Internet. Many of them have money. Few of them have Watts. Trust me, we don't want them to build out the Watts.

But don't buy it to run Vista on. That's a non starter.

The Atom delivers MORE performance/watt than Via's solutions.

Atom destroys the C7 in performance/watt. The C7 has a relatively poor memory architecture and has piss-poor SSE performance in comparison to the Atom. The C7 also cannot match the low consumption of the Atom at a similar clock speed.

If you really think the C7 has good performance/watt, just see how a DESKTOP Intel Celeron keeps pace with the C7 in terms of power consumption. The power consumption is within a few watts, and the Intel chip delivers more than double the performance in some benchmarks. Never mind that the Intel board costs less than anything Via has on-offer.

The Via Nano is closer: it delivers better per-clock integer performance (2 integer units vs one on the Atom), but the two chips deliver the same per-clock SSE performance. When you consider that the Nano uses 3-10x the power of the Atom at various clock speeds, you begin to see how Via can't compete on performance/watt.

That's a good choice. If you need another Mythbuntu client though you might try the Intel Atom motherboard. They've made great strides in power efficiency and it seems they'll make more.

I recommend the Pico PSU power kit to go with both yours and this new one. DC is the wave of the future.

Since we're talking about the walmart cluster try one of these gPC units for $199. Power is really low, but not as low as the item in TFA. I've bought them and they work great for linux or XP. Slap a couple terabyte SATA drives in there and it makes a fine media server.

If you want to save some watts and noise convert it to DC with a pico-psu for another fifty. If you're going for high density get four and mount the other three motherboards inside the first one, or mount them all on sheet of lexan - they make an interesting digital industrial wall covering for about the price of a nice framed print. BTW, if you're going for the wall covering look with the PicoPSU I would recommend Intel's Atom motherboard instead. It burns fewer watts and is cheaper because it doesn't come with a case and PSU. You'll have to buy a gig stick of DDR2 to go with it, but you're still money ahead going this way.