Slashdot Mirror
Pentium-M In Mini-ITX Format
Hektor_Troy writes "A German outfit is going to introduce a Pentium-M based mini-ITX board. Finally good performance in a small size. The manufacturer claims it can be cooled pasively, but I'd like to see it first." "Good performance in a small size" is relative, of course -- I like the quiet little EPIA system in front of me pretty well ;)
I love making very small computers to bring along to lan parties. It makes me salivate to think that one day, very soon, I'll bring a 3 GHZ P4 to a lan party, in a package I can carry in one hand! Very smart move.
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
Of course those things really aren't that small so it doesn't count for much of anything. Volume-wise they are much larger than low-profile desktop machines that have been around for years.
That's all well and good, but for it to be really nifty, it needs an AGP slot. I mean, a PCI or integrated video card might be "good enough" for most things, but what if I want to game with it?
hey!
Interestingly enough Pentium M MHz per MHz is faster than the Pentium 4.
Not that interesting. The regular P3, which the Pentium-M is based on, was also faster, clock for clock. The Athlon certainly is. But the very things that cause this (a really long pipeline and some other stuff I've forgotten) are what allow it to scale to the high clock speeds it can. For a while after the P4 came out it was widely thought to be a failure because of those trade-offs, but then they ramped it up to faster clock speeds and more software came out taking advantage of SSE2.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
"Good performance in a small size" is relative, of course -- I like the quiet little EPIA system in front of me pretty well ;)
Most of the new Pentium M laptops are mostly passive cooled. I can barely hear the fan on my friends laptop when it does kick in.
Why doesn't someone make a Mini-ITX case for this board, that comes with a laptop style cooler and has a small slit on the side of the case as an exhaust, just like a laptops?
Erm, the Centrino name means "includes Pentium M and Intel WiFi mini-PCI card" or something along those lines. I see TV adverts for Centrino many times a week so it seems to me they're marketing it pretty heavily.
Although the VIA/Centaur isn't exactly the fastest thing around, to me that isn't the most limiting factor of the EPIA line.
The abysmally slow onboard 3D graphics are what just really disappoint. I mean, I've built 8 EPIA-based systems but they've always been for use as workstations (Internet browsing), or simply mom and pop kind of computing usage.
Now, take a look at the article. Are those graphics memory slots I see? I know Intel Extreme 2 isn't exactly winning any awards but it's certainly better than the horrid S3 EPIA 3D. That, more than the processor, is what really interests me about this board.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
No matter how you do the math, no miniature PC will ever be as small as a miniature smart terminal with broadband.
The spec's say that there are dual LVDS outputs for Dual Head LCD displays.
This seems odd, since the industry has gone to DVI for digital LCD connections. I wonder if LVDS is used in laptops (since the Centrino technology is intended for laptops).
So, the questions are:
- Will the LVDS output work with the few LVDS capable monitors, such as the amazing widescreen LCD from SGI, the 1600SW?
- Are there converters available to go to DVI? The only one I could find is intended for the 1600SW, and it's very expensive and hard to find.
On the other hand, what if you want to hook up a floppy? I don't use my floppy much either, but it's like the jumper cables in my car. I don't need them very much either, but when I need them - I really need them.