Slashdot Mirror
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 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 built a couple of these. Great info and project ideas at www.mini-itx.com (creative name, eh?) and SPCR keeps up with much of this hardware.
I'm using a passive cooling model, a seagate barracuda, and a case with an fanless external power supply (blister pack) for my entertainment server, less than whisper, almost silent. Great server for an audiotron.
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.
i just bought a m1000 and i can say that if you use a dvd player with hardware acceleration support (no linux support yet) than it can keep up (about 30 to 40% cpu usage)
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.
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
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
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.
A friend of mine is setting up a web hosting farm completely built around the EPIA platform. My private server should be up and running in less than a month. Me and my friends also play UT on an EPIA server. Those bitty boxen are absolutely awesome for any sort of web/ftp/mail/game/file server or router application. Put a laptop drive in there instead of a 3.5" 7200RPM drive...lowers the cooling/power requirements and makes a quiet system even quieter.
If you want to use it as a serious server, though, my suggestion is to use that PCI slot and put a REAL NIC in there. The VIA-Rhine is kinda crappy and the Linux driver is buggy. I suggest Intel.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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.
PC/104 is great, but it's very expensive! The platform doesn't have a lot to offer in terms of Price/Performance ratio.
For example: Advantech's PCM-3350 PC/104 module with an optional PCMCIA PC/104 adapter and RAM is nearly $400. That's without a case or power supply. That's a lot of money for a GX1-300 processor (about the speed of a Intel Celeron 300). Then you have to get a notebook hard disk drive or a CF card for the data storage, as well as SO-DIMM RAM (i.e. notebook style RAM). That's big bucks for not a lot of bang.
Additionally, with PC/104, you only have 16-Bit I/O (similar to an ISA bus). With PC/104 Plus you can get 32-Bit I/O (similar to a PCI bus), but it is often hard to find PC/104 Plus devices to work with. Most PC/104 devices are just 16-Bit devices, which makes them unsuitable for a number of high-performance and/or intensive applications. And availability is often an issue. If memory serves, for our last set of PC/104 modules, it was over a month between when we ordered and when we received the delivery of the modules. That's a long time to wait.
For development for my clients that I have been working on, we have moved from PC/104 to using a Mini Micro ATX (similar to ITX) form factor. Elitegroup's EVEm mainboard has an 733MHZ VIA C3 processor. With optional TV-out capability and a PCI-bus interface, there's a lot of room to grow and expand without the limitations of the PC/104 platform. Plus, I can get the Mini Micro ATX system built for about half the price of the PC/104 system...
For the type of system that Tom's Hardware is interested in putting together and testing (home, office computer workstations, etc.) the PC/104 platform just isn't going to meet their needs. There are a number of legacy PC/104 devices that are used in embedded hardware applications and that keeps the suppliers in business, but for the most part, it seems that PC/104 platform is unsuitable for all but a very select group of customers.
These are the good old days you'll be telling your children about. Make them worthwhile.
Be sure to read up on the M10000 as Via didn't put in the CPU core that they had spec'ed for the initial release. Maybe by now they've released the new core.
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."
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks like the driver for TV-Out. I believe most of the complaints about the lack of "hardware acceleration" for the EPIA-M are aimed toward the lack of support for the MPEG-2 decoder in the CLE266 chipset.
The speed tests I've seen compare the Cyrix chips favorably with Celeron CPU's of the same clock speed. It looks like the CPU itself isn't quite so buff but because of the highly intergrated mobo certain operations that need to be fast still match or exceed the Celeron.
Also these CPU's have almost nothing to do with the Cyrix chips of old.. the name is just about the only part of Cyrix still being used.
I'd still say not to get this if raw speed is what you want but if you just want something competitive then the mini-ITX systems are perfectly okay.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
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.
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.
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.)