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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.
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?
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
When a motherboard with processor, video, nic, tv-out, usb and firewire that costs $150.00, you
can just buy another in three years.
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.
It really bothers me to see that VIA is claiming to support Linux, when this support is so poor. This review at Linuxathome.net only makes matters worse, since the reviewer tested most features on Windows, and verified Linux support by merely installing RedHat!
I really want to buy one of these boards, but I refuse to do so until VIA either releases decent drivers, or provides documentation for their hardware that would allow the open source community to build our own.