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 $150. I would also recommend Mini ITX. Cool service and quick delivery
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I hadn't heard about this form factor before, but a quick search on newegg.com shows that it's incredibly cheap! A VIA motherboard with a 1Ghz processor is only 170 something bucks!! Add 40-50$ 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?
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?
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?
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.
Hell yes, i'd race a mini-cooper against a T-bird. As long as it's not a drag race. The new T-bird isn't all *that* fast anyway. And a mini-cooper will trounce darn near anything in the twisties. BTW, I play q3 on my mini-itx box all the time. Geforce 2 MX 64MB PCI video card works wonders on those little things.
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
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.
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!).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
"Yep that will affect your ability to upgrade"
Very true, but almost every time I've done a CPU upgrade I've ended up buying a new motherboard anyway.
--
jc
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.
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.
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.