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Tom's Hardware Reviews VIA Mini-ITX Board
SlightlyMadman writes "Tom's Hardware has finally taken notice of the popular Mini ITX form factor, in this article. Sounds like these are the way to go for a new PC, so long as you don't have a deathmatch scheduled anytime soon." While the form factor on these boards are great, one gives up a lot in the way of ability to upgrade, since many parts are now soldered onto the motherboard.
in short
X yes but not with hardware acceleration
The nice thing about small form factor is that there are really quiet and can go into the louge. For example I have one which I use to stream MP3's from my main PC (via WiFI) into my Hifi. Also if you are like most geeks and have lying around you can make a new PC for about $150. I would also recommend Mini ITX. Cool service and quick delivery
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
i guess i have always been the kind of guy who likes 2'6" tall towers humming under my desk.
then why are you doing a deathmatch. If you are looking for power though, bigger is usually better. after all you wouldn't race a mini cooper against a T-bird, would you? Scarry thing to me is, frying the motherboard via heat death with little breathing room... what happens if you accidently put something near the fan, the next thing you know you have a new paperweight.... which you'd have to replace the entire board and not the processor... But some of the boards are cooled passivly... so that is less of a problem for those boards...
I hadn't heard about this form factor before, but a quick search on newegg.com shows that it's incredibly cheap! A VIA motherboard with a 1Ghz processor is only 170 something bucks!! Add 40-50$ for memory, 80$ for a decent sized hard drive, and 50-100$ for a case, and you have a complete and small computer. I'm thinking that you add a small lcd screen and a remote control (stick the IR receiver on the front of the case), and this is a perfect and incredibly cheap divx/mp3 player, connected to a TV and stereo system.
Maan
If they're not very upgradeable, why not that much more expensive and they include a screen, keyboard, and pointer.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
What about those of us who like those LARGE, NOISEY, SPACE HEATER... machines..
I mean, it makes me feel like I'm at work in the server room.. all the time,.. helps me sleep.
What about us?
-Paul
------------
Sase
"It's the opposite of that."
The review basically says they can't keep up for playing DVDs or streaming video. There goes my interest in them. At least, not without some hardware assist... I suppose one could try a video card that can offload the decoding. That's how the Tivo gets away with using such a low-end CPU, right?
Especially here at Slashdot? I want a computer that can hold 12 hard drives, 4 optical drives, both a 3.5" and 5.25" floppies, plus 9 fans, 3 video cards, 2 sound cards, AND a radio scanner. I don't see how all of that will fit in a small factor.
I own one of the 800 MHz Mini-ITX boards. With a Compact Flash card as a hard drive, a little bit of RAM and a reduced FreeBSD operating system you can have a good firewall, DHCP server, DNS server or anything you want. They are very quite and can be placed in a drawer or small cabinet. I have tried Windows XP and it can play mp3s and movies fairly well. The newer versions are better for multimedia.
I've been doing a bit of development (for one of my clients) using the Mini Micro ATX Mainboard-based systems from Elitegroup (ECS). The mainboard that I've been using is the EVEm mainboard in the ECS IN22 system (the "U-Buddie" system as they call it).
The system that I have been using features a C3 processor at 733Mhz (the "1GigaPro" as they call it) and it has the VIA PLE133 chipset and it works great... I have had no stability or reliability issues so far, and we have purchased 10 of them over the past month or so.
The best news is that the system, which comes as a package in a sleek black and silver case, is cheap. Very cheap. The whole system with mainboard, case, power supply, 10 GB notebook hard disk drive, 24X CD-ROM, 56K modem riser, on-board 10/100 NIC and 128MB RAM is only about USD $199. Compared with the Mini ITX equiped systems, there is a nearly 33% savings for the exact same specifications. They both even use the same PLE133 chipset that is mentioned in the Tom's Hardware article for the EPIA C3 mainboard.
Slashdot users may also be please to note that the system comes pre-loaded with a Linux distribution called ThizLinux that is quite user-friendly and easy to configure.
Mini-ITX systems are great, but I think the Mini Micro ATX systems, like the ones based on the EVEm from ECS are a better value, giving nearly identical performance at a lower price.
These are the good old days you'll be telling your children about. Make them worthwhile.
The real revolution will start when the MicroATX boards start coming in consumer devices, without the customer knowing it. So your next DVD player may have one of these inside, run Linux and be able to play Ogg, DivX, Quake, Freecell and Minesweeper.
to start with, I just put a little invertor in my car, under the front passenger seat. Good for charging laptops, and anything else which craves electric power. (I hate cig-lighter adapters, besides which I have too little incentive to bother replacing my current -- broken -- one.)
...
...) A small case, the smallest LCD I can find, a little hard drive ... Seems about all that's necessary.
The basic reasons I'd like a small, low-power computer in my car:
- recording web cam output. I have a currently unused webcam I'd like to point out the front window. Ideally, I'd like to have ones in all directions
- audio playback. Changing in-flight the discs of an 8-hour audiobook on CD is annoying. Choosing a playlist (of the same discs, converted to oggs) before starting to drive is much simpler.
- GPS display. Where am I, and why aren't I where I thought I was?
Those are the top 3; there are other reasons too (keep a wireless router there, and be able to multiplex connections when there's some truly ubiquitous wireless access to speak up; play games when stopped for whatever reason, have a microphone for recording oddball thoughts while driving; use it as an audio TiVO for recording Prairie Home Companion as I listen, etc).
The VIA boards look nice for this kind of application, both because they won't strain my invertor and because they're very small. (And the built-in ports simplify things
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
See http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/index.php for more details.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
with minimal Linux support, and few PCI slots.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
This is also small form factor, and has simpler power requirements than ATX. May be more expensive, though, but it _is_ a standard which has been around for a while. You can actually expand these a bit. You can get these boards equiped with pentiums on down to NEC V-25s (whoo-hoo 10 big MHZ!).
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
I have been interested in the format for long, when I wanted to build my own mediaplayer. Playing music, movies/series and maybe even record or use digital television would be really great for everyone to build from. I think that from moving to be PC-builders we would also become to be more building media-equipments in our homes.
(yes this can be compared with sex)
I'm using an EPIA-M with a 600 Mhz Eden processor. It seems to be fast tenough encoding and decoding stuff. However, the EPIA-M doesn't seem to be that well supported on Linux. I suggest using the ALSA drivers instead of the Open Source Sound drivers or those that come with either Mandrake 9.1 or Redhat 8.0. The embeded video card works fine with the standard EPIA drivers, but the direct mpeg2 doesn't work. Overall I'm pretty happy with it, but there are problems.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
These run too hot too? I would have thought that the best market for these would be small appliance-like devices that would run not-that-fast-but-fast-enough, generate very little heat, and use little power.
Has everyone gone the other way? I'd love to build a little firewall/webserver out of something like this, (especially now that Sun drove cobalt into the ground and charges 2-3x what they charge for their V100s).
Are there any options out there for these small/cool/lower-power computers? Where can I find one?
"Haven't we met before?"
--sdem
This isn't just a comment on these boards reviewed here, but on small form factors and integrated graphics in general: why can't they make them with DVI video outputs? I mean, you're not going to be playing twitch games on these things so why not?
When a motherboard with processor, video, nic, tv-out, usb and firewire that costs $150.00, you
can just buy another in three years.
While the form factor on these boards are great, one gives up a lot in the way of ability to upgrade, since many parts are now soldered onto the motherboard.
Uhh... no.... they are IN the motherboard, not just soldered to it.
While the form factor on these boards are great, one gives up a lot in the way of ability to upgrade, since many parts are now soldered onto the motherboard.
Doesn't anyone else remember those horrible Packard Bell and Wang (haha) computers that soldered most of their parts to the motherboard? It was not something good, and we all hated it. I just hope it doesn't become a trend again, because I won't buy it (quite literally!).
Nice small form factor, like Mini-ITX.
1 AGP slot, 2 PCI slots
Onboard LAN
AthlonXP supporting chipset
2GB max ram
This way, I have onboard lan, can choose my own video card, choose my own sound card, and still have another slot left incase the onboard lan dies, or incase i need a modem for dialup.
I haven't looked very hard, but most mini-itx boards i see have onboard video and sound, which pretty much sucks for anyone planning on doing anymore more than word processing.
Every time someone talks about mini-ITX lately, there's always the inevitable comment "don't plan on running Quake 3 on it" or some such nonsense.
:). Toss in even a 10gb hard drive and you can have thousands upon thousands of games available. Coupla USB controllers, built in TV-out.. *drool* Hell, add on the always mentioned mp3 player, and it's multifunctional.
:(
If I had the cash, I'd say one of these would make the *perfect* emulation console. You can get cases about the same size as the board, maybe 4-5 inches high (ie: smaller than an Xbox
Oh yeah, there's always that legality issue
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
When I first saw these things, I saw the small cases for them and they were pretty snazzy. There is a french company (can't recal the link) that makes nice shiny boxes for these things that are basically little cubes.
I use laptops for all of my home sitdown machines, and then ssh into servers to do anything that needs more power than the laptop. I don't play games at all. I do financial analsys on the servers that are set up in a cluster (albeit a frequently down cluster these days).
So I had no desire for these boxes as a personal machine, but I thought perhaps they would do well as nodes in a cluster since they are small, use less power, and aren't noisy.
But, while they are cheaper, the "bang for the buck" factor then makes them too expensive for clusters. They just aren't that fast and their network performance isn't so hot (without an additional card - which then drives up the cost some more).
In the end, I'm currently more more pleased with the Epox 8KMM+ for cluster boards - it is an ATX-Micro - not nearly as small - but still not the full ATX, and it has all the stuff on board.
In May I will be head of a technology group and will have to start caring about business machines for Joe User. These baby machines are great for them - they just need to run Excel, Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint.
They don't need any real power, so these machines are a great way to save money, power, and reduce noise in an office.
I will certainly consider these - especially since computers get marked up nearly 2X in cost in Bermuda where I will be. So saving money is essential.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
There is a unit that I've been looking at made by FIC, which they have named CR51 "Falcon" which uses the 17cm x 17cm mini-itx board from Via and comes with a 933mhz processor. Newegg has it, for $150, which includes case, power supply, motherboard, cpu, and heatsink/fan. What interested me about this is that apparently by adding only RAM and an optical drive, there is a firmware included ("RaptureWare") that boots in 4-5 seconds to play mp3s, DVDs, VCDs and audio CDs. Add hard drive and you have a full computer.
c _f orm_factor.shtm has a review, but the site goes up and down. Use the google cache instead.
I didn't buy it, mostly because I would be buying it for someone else, but also I looked at the floating point performance and decided that it wasn't that great for a general-purpose desktop for them.
http://www.ownt.com/technews/2003/fic_falcon/fi
[a good half hour of google searching later...]
It's really hard to find reviews of this thing. Dammit.
When their site comes back up, I'll post a thread from my LUG about the boards. The best idea that I have is to buy the FIC CR51 Falcon and put a wireless card in it and put MeshAP on it, or take a few of the mini-itx boards, hook them up to be powered from car batteries, add wireless and have a mobile wireless network. Would be kinda cool, no?
fair.org counterpunch.com truthout.com indymedia.org salon.com
eff.org guerrilla.net debian.org gentoo.org
For the record, you CAN get hardware acceleration under Linux with the built-in Trident chipset--it's not the normal trident.c driver in the kernel. Here's a link (no guarantees, it's Geocities):
http://www.geocities.com/jagasian/
I personally own five mini-itx systems, and I've purchased about another 20 for my firm. Up until this past month, we didn't have the space to install real rack servers, so I started buying Epia 800 boards and Cubid 2677R cases--they're tiny, low power, and not very noticable, and more than fast enough for a firewall, mail server, web server, what-have-you. And they look a lot sexier lying around the office.
We also use them for forensic work. Put an IDE controller in the PCI slot, and you can pack the entire machine, plus an LCD monitor, keyboard, and mouse, into a breifcase-sized Pelican case. Pack a few extra PCI cards (SCSI, FW, MFM/RLL controller) and you can access just about any hard drive ever made. Many's the time we've made our reputation by being on the scene in hours, fully prepared and able to do a drive acquisition, for a job that the competition needed two days to prepare for. Clients eat that shit up.
Basically, you haven't lived until you've had a really portable system with actual PCI slots. I have a laptop, but this is a whole 'nother ball game.
The seems to be two types of "user" out there. Those who what massive amounts of upgradeability, and those who don't.
I'm both.
I have a massively over powered box with masses of disks, multiple network adaptors, CD/DVD drive, CD burner, masses of memory, top-notch graphics, etc., etc. It's the computer I MUST HAVE to do what I do. It is truly "the canine's gonads".
It's also mostly an ornament. Owing to the excessive noise it generates, I only use it when I really need it. And I never need it as I've got boxes in my cellar that do everything I ever need - all running on yesterday's "must have" hardware.
So I find that now what I really need is small, quiet, unobtrissive, reasonably performing box - with a big screen. Don't need it to be upgradeable - just need one in every room in the house.
So, these mini-ITX boards look great. Small, quiet, and in all ways absolutely ideal.
Alas. I've spent so much on my techological ornament uber-beastie.... d'oh
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
...Unless you want to watch pirated DivX movies, "backup" MP3s, edit video, do any kind of serious audio mixing, any kind of print-quality work with Photoshop, or of course 3D gaming. So, like, if all you use your computer for is web surfing and email, why even bother with Linux and everything else?
--sdem
Mini distro for turning a mini itx system into a media player box... 16mb rootfs file system bootable from compact flash and via pxe net booting :)
http://www.freevix.org
lol, for a second there i thought it read "slightlysaddam" anyone else see the same thing?
I tried installing Mandrake (sorry, I don't remember which pre-release, but it was recent); SuSE 8.1 from DVD; and Red Hat (Phoebe 8.0.93 prerelease). The only one that had any luck was Phoebe. Mandrake wouldn't install due to crashes; SuSE wouldn't install from DVD -- some form of IDE-DVD data corruption. Got it to install using CD's, but got some random crashes later.
The M9000 uses the CLE266 chipset, which has a new video part. In all 3 distros, you're stuck with the VESA driver -- which meant no acceleration and a far-from-lovely 60Hz refresh rate.
Why did I use cutting-edge distros? Because the board has very 'new' hardware -- firewire ports, USB2, CLE266, audio, etc. The IDE, audio, and various ports worked fine with Phoebe, right down to the Epson C82 inkjet I connected via USB. But the VESA video is just plain awful.
VIA offers binary-only video drivers for older distributions, and has been promising (but not delivering) source for ages -- but only for 2D video functions. They've cited "legal issues" on any support for the hardware MPEG decoder and 3D.
(Pay attention: useful links coming up :-)
The drivers they've released thus far have been for older distributions, mainstream only. Just try Gentoo or something. There are many frustrated users out there right now.
For the curious, here's what I'm using: EPIA-M9000 ($150) in a $28 generic mini-ATX (not ITX) case w/250W power supply; 512MB PC2100 RAM; 120GB Maxtor hard drive; LG combo DVD-ROM/CD-R (16X DVD, 32x10x40x CDR); Intel eepro100 ethernet; external modem and other peripherals. Yes, it currently does firewalling amongst its other duties.
Bottom line: consider this some bleeding-edge, undersupported hardware and proceed accordingly.
What the thread doesn't mention is that if you plan to put
any serious network load on an EPIA system, you want Linux
2.4.21pre6 or later. via-rhine 1.17 dies under load.
Except you can put 2.8+ athlon XP's on them (which makes the need for GOBS of fans) plus a Nvidia Gefore 4 AGP to make a butt-kicking gaming machine that is super duper tiny.
:-)
I made one ithat is 4 inches wide 12 inches tall and 14 inches deep. with a handle on the top and a mini-ATX power supply with a dvd drive and a super tiny in space 20 gig hard drive (My gawd man How can you even install windows on that!)
I made a lanparty box smaller than everyone elses, FASTER than any of the laptop players there and doesnt give you a hernia to get there.
Oh and it's cheap enough to buy a 15 inch flat panel to go with it.
Sure the L33t d00ds laugh at it's size and my tiny monitor. but when I frag them constantly and can easily collect my things and leave after battering them senseless I'm the one laughing and waiving yelling "Thanks for the target practice! next time we'll try MOVING targets!"
It's priceless
Are you seperable from electronic devices? Or do you have some kind of fucked up symbiotic relationship where if you don't have your laptop with you at all times, you'll keel over and convulse?
--sdem
I value very quiet computers so I use a 533Mhz EPIA (passively cooled) as my main workstation.
The case is a Chyang Fun cube, with the power supply replaced with a 60W DC->DC one. Instead of a hard drive I use a compact flash to boot an OpenBSD diskless kernel and then onwards everything is over the network to my disk server in the other room. Since the compact flash is only read for the kernel and never written to it shoulnd't die too quickly.
Result? No moving parts and therefore dead silent. It's very nice. All works fine under OpenBSD although I'm using a Matrox G200 for the graphics rather than what's on-board so I can't comment on that.
In the UK you can get this stuff from Ultim8PC and LinITX.
I know this is a little offtopic, but don't most computers run off of DC, at varying voltages less than 12? (Well, Nominal car voltage is something like 14V I think, but close enough)
Wouldn't it be possible to wire a computer more directly into the car, maybe with a few resistors and perhaps a DC to DC converter, to 'clean up' the power?
I have a power inverter in my car, and it's great, and the most readily available off the shelf solution, but I'm curious to see what other's thoughts are...
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I'm currently running a 800mhz Mini-ITX as my network router and media player. Everything runs great on it so far too.
I chose to go the route of the Mini for is ability to fit into small spaces. Since our network is centralized around the television, I needed a system that would easily fit into our entertainment center. Mount the Mini into a gutted DVD player and viola!
Later
Josh
However, the lack of L2 cache (and maybe not even any L1?) absolutely cripples performance on some things; a Logitech USB web cam struggles to get 3 FPS, because it needs the CPU to do decompression of the video stream. USB-1 isn't fast enough to stream 640x480 uncompressed video, and this board doesn't support USB-2 (the newest ones do, but they also NEED a CPU fan).
I plan to play with emulation (I think it'd be amusing to turn one into a every-obsolete-computer-you-ever-owned box) but the lack of cache might kill that idea. It ought to be able to emulate a 2MHz 6502 though...
Jon.
NOT $170!! That's not cheap!
PC-Chips M787CL+ V3.0 Socket 370/667M CPU/SIS/A&V&L&M/MATX/Bulk Motherboard for $49
$49!!! Now that's cheap! I've done several systems, you can replace the fan/heatsink with a Zalman northbridge heatsink, then run it with only the power supply fan. The only noise audible is the harddrive whine.
CPU: SOCKET 370, BUILT IN VIA C3 1GIGA PRO CPU ON BOARD (CYRIX 734MHZ)
CHIPSET: SIS630S (FSB133)
MEMORY: 2 DIMMS FOR PC133 SDRAM UP TO 1G
SLOTS: 3PCI, 1AMR
AUDIO: AC'97 ON BOARD
VIDEO: INTEGRATED ADVANCED 128BIT 2D/3D GRAPHIC ENGINE
LAN: INTEGRATED IN SIS 630E (ON BOARD)
MODEM: 1AMR CARD
MICRO ATX, BULK
I installed FreeBSD 5.0 + IPFilter and I couldn't be happier. I use it to share my cable connection around the house. Best of all, it's right next to the TV and has S-Video out, so I'll be installing XWindows soon and using it to watch MPEG's, play MP3s, etc.
The best part is the thing only uses 5-15 watts, so it's super cheap to run. It's also totally fanless. Great little piece of hardware.
Personally I would like to see one of these fitted with a mobile PIII or P4. It would be a bit more expensive but would pack a bigger punch.
if all you use your computer for
When I was a kid my parents had a radio in every room of the house. I could never workout why. These things didn't even have stereo, or seperate speakers - just small cheap portable transistor radios (which were never "ported"). Whereas the sound system in my bedroom was a really "power-user" system. Worth more than all the other electrical equipment in the house combined. I always promised that when I could afford it I would build myself the ultimate sound system.
But now I could afford such a thing I find that all really I need is a radio in every room of the house.
Fairly soon I'll also have a computer for every room in the house - and I've got a BIG house. When my son grows-up he'll likely think I'm mad - as his PC will likely blow the pants off all of my computers - combined. Much in the same way you think anyone interested in these ITX boards must be mad. But I'm not mad, I've just integrated computers into my life in a slightly different manner than you.
So when you see hardware like this - which isn't designed for your lifestyle - don't knock it. It's mot made for you.
why even bother with Linux
Let's say you found a need for small lowish powered PCs in each room of your house. What would you rather run on it?
Me? I'm sticking to the OS I know and love.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
However, when I drive long distances (which I do pretty often), I like to listen to stories -- mysteries, or history books, or things like Bob Newhart comedy ... sometimes even music.
...). The other reasons aside (things like GPS), my biggest reason for wanting a computer in the car is to have a portable audio library with me. When small CD players play Ogg files (soon), perhaps I'll let the other computer possibilities fade away.
Radio is often useless for this (it's all sports, religion, bad music
I don't know if you drive / own a car or are otherwise ever on long trips where you enjoy listening to music or other things. If you *do* have (or have access to) a car, does it have a radio?
timothy
(Owlguy wrote: " Are you seperable from electronic devices? Or do you have some kind of fucked up symbiotic relationship where if you don't have your laptop with you at all times, you'll keel over and convulse?")
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Most any mother board you get now has 90% of its components 'on-board'.
Ibm started the process with the PS/2.
It has its upside and downside..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
While the form factor on these boards are great, one gives up a lot in the way of ability to upgrade, since many parts are now soldered onto the motherboard.
From the Article...
The Mini ITX standard is not diminutive by accident and miniaturization has been achieved primarily by doing away with various components. The first victim of the red pen was the CPU socket, which simply took up too much space. That is why the processor is always soldered directly onto VIA EPIA boards.
Yep that will affect your ability to upgrade.
Yes, many of us computer geeks like to think we have big equipment .....
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
In my house, we have "real" systems in just about every room (two Macs, a P4, a couple of Athlons, and assorted other stuff), but I use a Mini-ITX system as the server to run it all. I'm using the Eden-533 processor in a Cubid case, with an external DC power supply, no floppy, and a laptop hard drive. It runs fanless, and the only thing you ever hear from it is the occasional chirp out of the hard drive.
I run e-Smith Linux on it, which is based loosely on Redhat, but tuned specifically to be a SOHO server. No video issues because it only uses text mode - I do all the admin either from the console or through the web interface. It makes a powerful little server.
My old home server was a Flex ATX system that was almost as small (one of the old "Book PC's"), but it had the loud fan on the built-in PS, plus a CPU fan for the Celery 366 I ran in it. And from an airflow perspective, it was all cramped up inside. It was slower, hotter, and louder than the ITX, even though the form factor was almost identical.
As I mentioned above, I have plenty of computers that are more powerful, but the speed is fine for most routine purposes. I'll always keep a high-octane PC around for gaming and such, and I still use Macs a decent amount, but I suspect I'll buy more Mini-ITX systems down the road for the computers that'll just handle the basics. They're smaller, use less juice, and you don't realize how great silent operation is until you have it.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
got a link where we can pick it up for that price?
The extremely low power consumption of the MiniITX boards makes them ideal for running my company's webserver. Compared to the Athlon servers they replaced, they consume a fraction of the power; they should run a lot longer off our large UPS next time there is a power outage.
Performance problems? The low cost has made it easy to purchase more computers, each running specialized tasks. The most mission critical computers get the biggest UPS.
It was ages ago that I was of the opinion that integrated components were bad. This was from experience and for economic reasons. Experience dictated that a plug in device would fail. Economics dictated that a motherboard was horribly expensive.
As costs have plummeted and devices that normally would be on a plug in card have become more reliable and the mechanisms for disabling onboard devices have become more reliable. I've reconsidered 'glue and go' motherboards for some applications.
I've built several of these for friends and family
using several vendors of these styles of motherboards and have had a low dissatisfaction level.
I would not use one for myself, I love my audio and video card too much. But I do have a couple of file boxes built on 'glue and go' motherboards and they do what I want and at a good price.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Here's a question for the "/." crowd. Anyone know were I can get specs (data-sheets) and/or OSS drivers for the "C-Cube E4"? The company was bought by LSI.
I recently bought her a laptop. Mostly so she could surf/work while watching Oprah.
This has been working well enough, but recently she asked how difficult it would be to combine things so she could watch TV and surf/work on the same screen.
I went looking, and came across mini-itx boards.
Then I found the Leadtek TV2000 (http://www.leadtek.com.tw/www/Web_Leadtek/multim
You know, it's starting to look like I could have a little networked entertainment/work server with IR interfaces for kb/mouse/channel changer.
Now I need that 32" LCD screen to get cheap (oh, and available).
Pat
--
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Found via PriceWatch:
PC-Chips M787CL+ $49
The 667mhz is incorrect, it's 733mhz
You can find the Zalman northbridge heatsink at NewEgg for $6 (but shipping sucks).
The regular VIA C3 heatsinks won't work since there is no Socket to hook onto.
Zalman Chipset Heatsink (includes pushpin mount)
You CAN build a none mini-ITX system of similar specs for less if you work at it but you end up with a nosier, hotter, bigger, power hungry machine. The mini-ITX systems are virtually a complete system in the size of a toaster. For mini-servers they kick ass. For desktop machines they kick ass. I was thinking of trying to make a cluster of them as I think they'd be really cool in that role too. They can also be easily adapted into a laptop or wearable computer. Mine I rip/play DVD's with all the time and it acts as my LAN's gateway, firewall, and proxy server. It runs Linux very well. My only complaint is that the case I have (an iCube) only has room for two hdd's and the dvd drive. That limits me to 240Gb od hdd space in this machine. The mobo itself would allow me to put a third 120Gb hdd in if I could figure out where I could mount it.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The mini-ITX saves you time and effort. It'd all in one neat little package for you. If only they'd add WiFi to the board it'd be damned near perfect. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
You realize that this is not the same motherboard? I found one of these the other day in my quest for the Via board, and the price for it was 1600 baht, or under $US40. In my opinion, the SIS630 chipset has been around for a while and is fairly well supported under Linux, so I would actually prefer the cheaper board. You can buy a full system from the shop I saw it at complete with speakers and 15" monitor for only 10,xxx baht, or about $US250. Nice. I could buy a complete, new diskless client for 8,600 baht, or $US200.
Put identity in the browser.
What irks me is that there's not a -march=c3 target in recent GCC releases. The C3 currently works best when you use '-m486 -m3dnow -mmmx' which is nasty. VIA needs to kick a GCC developer a few thousand and a few books so GCC can get a proper target for VIA's products. Until there's proper scheduling and cache-management for this processor (on the compiler end) everything is gonna feel REAL SLOW on it.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
When I went to visit my parents at Christmas, I didn't have room or time to take my full tower case with me. But I pulled my hard drive (on which I had already downloaded EIPA drivers) on my main machine and took the EIPA instead. I had a big collection of DS9 episodes in various formats (DivX, wsf, other .avi, maybe even mpeg). Anyway, I didn't think they'd play very well on this machine, but they worked great in 640x480. Any higher resolution had problems playing, but it can handle any video of lower resulotion than that. Unfortunately, this doesn't include DVDs, they're watchable, but it tends to skip. But then again, I have the 533 MHz model, since it didn't require a fan, and I want a totally silent machine. If you can put up with a small fan on the 800 MHz version, I imagine it wouldn't have any troubles with DVDs. I honestly didn't expect to be able to play DVDs at all, but for as well as it did, I bet the little extra horsepower of a 800 MHz machine would be sufficient to play quite well.
Thanks for the feedback. Couple of questions: What were you using for a display? TV or VGA? (though, I'm not sure that matters for performance...) What OS are you using? If it's Windows, the driver should be able to use the MPEG2 decoder to help with DVDs, yes? Or does your model not have that video hardware? The reason I ask is because I would tend to think it would play DVDs better, since it wouldn't be 100% CPU for the decoding.
:) In fact, I think there is a great use for this kind of hardware... pretty much just what you described. I just want to make sure it will work for my purposes.)
Good to know that even the 533 does a decent job with soft codecs, though.
(And I meant "Crap" as in, "that's not going to work how I thought", not "this hardware is Crap."
Nuff Said!
I was thinking about taking some power tools to a Mac LCII that I fished out of a dumpster at work last week (it still works fine, btw) and trying to shoehorn one of these mini-ITX boards into it. I think there should be just enough vertical room if I hack the internals of the case enough. All I'd need to do would be extend the floppy slot to accommodate a slot-loading DVD, and cut out the back panel to accommodate the ITX ports. Anyone know where you can get slimline ATX power supplies in Australia?
I'd never buy PC-Chips motherboards. They are cheap for a reason and I found out the hard way.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
I was using VGA for output, for some reason I couldn't enable the TV output, I still haven't figured out why, but I only tried a couple times. I was using it under Windows 98, and when I tried playing DVDs, I used PowerDVD with hardware accelleration, and it was kind of jerky. One thing I might mention, I was using PC100 memory instead of PC133 memory, so that might have made things slower. But DVDs were far worse than the "soft codec" decoding. Like I said, it had problems with any video at 800x600, and DVDs normally decode to 800x600, so it was having to scale the image down to 640x480, whereas the other codecs were scaling the video up to 640x480. I was almost tempted to start ripping my DVDs just so I could watch them in good quality, but I would want a lot heaftier processor than a 533 C3 for DVD ripping/encoding.
I was unable to boot into Linux, but this is most likely because I had compiled my kernal with Celeron (Coppermine) support, and it gave me a bunch of illegal instruction errors, so I can't report on any Linux video playback.
I have an uncanny ability to break computers, often in strange and untraceable ways. I also have a tendency to buy tower computers that are far too large for moving around with, and then end up moving them ... again.
:) And at their power draw, I could have several going at once (squashing my DVDs to reasonable size, capturing Futurama reruns for later watching) and still be using only a fraction of the electricity sucked down by my previous setups, and generating less noise.
So, in addition to being through for the most part with CRTs (that is, I don't plan to buy any more), I think I'm also through with standard tower computers. I have one of shuttle's little shoebox-sized cases, and I like it a lot, but the noise draws me to fanless mini-ITX for the next go-round
And with a decent video card, I could play Flightgear, probably even with one of the fanless varieties.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
See mini-itx.com for a much more complete list of products and reviews.
(Top left corner: "Tom takes notice", referring to the belated nature of the Tom's Hardware article.)
A friend and I have built 6 of these things, had no problems. Works fine, but then I'm not talking enterprise servers, more like a fax machine, or a linux router.
Anyway, here is virtually the same board from ECS (or as we call it, Extra Cheap Shit), for $59.
ECS P6VEM3
Anyone ever think of using these as embedded alternatives? They're cheap and offer more power then any other embedded solution out their. Plus, the development cycle is much shorter since its all x86 based.