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Via Now Shipping Dual-Processor Mini-ITX Board
An anonymous reader writes "Via is now shipping its first dual-processor mini-ITX board. The DP-310 features two 1GHz processors, gigabit Ethernet, support for SATA drives, and a media-processing graphics chipset. It targets high-density applications -- according to Via, a 42-U rack with 168 processors would draw about 2.5 kilowatts, or about as much power as two hair dryers." This also looks like the basis for a nice car computer. Also on the small-computing front, an anonymous reader submits "General Micro, meanwhile, last week released what it calls the world's fastest mini-ITX board, powered by a Pentium M clocked up to 2.3GHz. "
If you want to see what cool stuff people are doing with mini-ITX, check out http://www.mini-itx.com/. Mini-ITX is a form factor where the board is 6.7"x6.7"
It should be noted that the photos do not show the heat sinks that in fact are intalled on the board.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
$1800 each for the P620. $850 each for "OEM" quantities. Too rich for my blood.
Not quite...
Benchmark review of a single 933 Via processor
Granted, this is the C3, which is slightly inferior to the Eden-N being used here. Can you see the second processor in the arithmetic benchmarks, the one running about equally? That's a 333mhz PII. Even being generous and saying this newer series chip has significantly sped up, we're still talking performance equal to maybe a dual 500 Mhz PIII.
Useable? Yes. Acceptable for generic web browsing and word processing? Maybe. An excellent-performing midrange desktop replacement? No way. The Mhz myth is definitely in effect here, just not like you might initially think. These things are fine and dandy as a generic file server where speed is not a supreme priority, and they work fine as a router/gateway or simple firewall, but please don't try to use them for much else.
Give me a link to a SATA optical drive!
Plextor 716SA
Now, if you say "give me a link to a second SATA optical drive", I might have a harder time.
Given Via's history of announcing Mini/Nano-itx boards as "shipping now" and not shipping for anything up to a year or so (anyone actually seen commercial supplies of standard generic 1-processor Nano-ITX boards yet?), does anyone know if this is *actually* shipping? Mini-itx.com doesn't have it, neither does epiacenter.com or linitx.com. I'll believe "shipping now" when someone actually has it...
Beware the psychokinetic mimes!
a link to the actual product page
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
What kind of hair dryer are you using?
most hair dryers are around 1800 watts, 1.25 watts per hair dryer won't dry anything.
They come up with the ITX platform so that they could pimp off these horrible processors. From what I have read they are not good for much of anything except single task as an mp3 player.
:)
I had a via mini-ITX board 2 years ago. It was 800mhz. I put a tv tuner card in the box and captured cable tv to divx in real time. That took about 35-40% CPU. That means I was able to watch other divx movies (via the Composite TV-OUT) at the same time it was encoding. Oh, and mp3blaster worked great too!
and no I didn't RTFA
or anything else for that matter, eh?
A bicycle light would consume about 2Watts (rude guess).
A typical light bulb is 60 Watts.
An electric heater is 2000 Watts typical.
And I just went downstairs to check, a hairdryer is 1500 Watts (my mother is a hairdresser, so it's a "professional" version).
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
(via the Composite TV-OUT)
strike that. it was a pci geforce2 MX400 card with tv-out. so, most the graphics processing was offloaded onto it.
The is the second mini-itx board that VIA has released based on the CN400 chipset. This chipset is supposed to have SIGNIFICANTLY improved performance, largely stemming from greatly improved memory bandwidth.
Inconceivable!
My previous primary computer was a first-generation Alienware laptop that I'm still paying for. I assume I'll use it more once I clear out some space for it. It has an amazing screen. For now, though, the Mini is doing most everything I need it to (except Half-Life 2), and I'm easing myself into Unix while I'm at it.
Honor Among Slackers. A veri
it seems to be a pre-production board or maybe even fake images. The real thing also has 2 memory slots...
. js p?motherboardId=321
http://www.viaembedded.com/product/epia_dp_spec
Go to VIA directly and you shall see...
Peter.
Those pictures don't match what's on via's site:
EPIA DP
Note the orientation of the processors, and the lack of PS2 ports on the (official?) pictures.
.
2.5kW was for the ENITIRE RACK. A single unit is pulling about 60W, which is only 5A in a car.
Noise I agree with, but power? What do I care if the system in my bedroom corner is sucking down 200w or 90w? Not like that's $50 more a month, or even $10 for that matter. You're talking a couple bucks at most.
Check out the electricity calculator. Enter the watts and your kw/hr and it'll tell u you how you're spending.
At 8 cents a kWh this is what I got:
200w = 38 cents a day... $11.52/mo, $140/yr.
90w = 17 cents/day... $5.18/mo, 63.07/yr
Sorry, that $6 more per month is nothing to cry about, although after seeing that $80 yearly difference I think I will keep downloads going on the laptop from now on and only fire up the desktop when I have serious work to do, especially since my PSU is closer to double that rating so double that cost. Still, doesn't justify buying a laptop for downloading or paying extra for a power-saving system with no processing power.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
It's supported by the Unichrome sourceforge project.
Some motherboard chipsets are better-supported than the others. I have a motherboard based on the VIA PM800 chipset, but at the time I tried, I couldn't get it to work with the driver since PM800 support was experimental. While the VESA driver works, I had to install a cheap AGP card since I needed gamma correction to compensate for my (cheap) overbright LCD panel.
I just checked again and someone got the PM800 working. I'll try that when I reinstall my box (soon).