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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 $150. I would also recommend Mini ITX. Cool service and quick delivery
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I hadn't heard about this form factor before, but a quick search on newegg.com shows that it's incredibly cheap! A VIA motherboard with a 1Ghz processor is only 170 something bucks!! Add 40-50$ 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
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
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.
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.
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.
Arguable on ALL points. The Mini-ITX Spec dictates that the mobo can't use more than like 25 watts. In many cases, a 50-70 watt PSU is MORE than enough. Laptops may use less, but you don't buy laptops because they use very little power (in most cases) you buy them because they're portable. This is NOT meant to be as portable as a laptop. Plus, a Mini-ITX system can be run COMPLETELY Fanless. Try doing that with most laptops of the same speed. Laptops aren't THAT much smaller for the price increase, and you can only get a laptop capable of doing video/audio for $150 if you enjoy compressing video to 50x50 at 10k/s (not really, but you get the point.) For $300, you can have a computer that will play all your music, and movies WITHOUT recompressing them, and have more space to store them, to boot.