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Via Launches a New Mini-ITX System
primesuspect writes "Coming in close to the 10th anniversary of the format and billed as a 'motherboard for digital home media DIY enthusiasts,' VIA have paired their Nano X2 1.4ghz dual-core CPU with their VX900 chipset to produce an intriguing addition to their mini-ITX lineup." Mini-ITX, to my pleasure, has never gone completely away: witness the (slow, but not stopped) flow of news at Mini-ITX.com.
If you ask me Mini-ITX really should've lost out to Mini-DTX
What chipset problems have already been identified? What else is likely to go wrong?
I keep thinking of building a "media center[sic]" computer with TV card but there always seems to be some horrible flaw in any setup I consider. Is there an exception yet?
Ha ha ha ha... Just kidding! (I wouldn't touch VIA for Linux, until they clean up their track record.)
But is there a single compelling reason for this over an E-350 solution? ... or an Atom solution?
It looks good, but it would be nice to see the legacy ports ditched (serial, PS2 and VGA) and focus on current connectors. It would be nice to see display port or mini display port on there.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I have thrown away way too much money on VIA mini-itx crap. people claim that they are stable but the crash like crazy. A friend who use windows and VIA claimed that they were stable... after some probing (I was wondering how his machines were stable while my Linux boxes crashed on close to a daily basis) I was told "Well it reboots now and then but apart from that they work perfectly!". One mans idea of stability is NOT the same as another's. I now use Intel Atom on all my small machines, show me a VIA machine with an uptime of 400+ days and I will eat my n270!
Both the CPU and chipset are not socketed. If the CPU fails, you're out the entire board, unless you have truly l33t skills and equipment handy. That makes the motherboard an even bigger single point of failure.
As the title. So much design must go in to these boards but all of the cases look awful. :-(
...for some raspberry pi.
What is this, 2001? Just remove that junk and give me some extra USB ports.
Are there any good, cheap, low-power Mini-ITX motherboard that have 4 (or 6) SATA ports instead of just 2? I've already filled my PCI slot, and I'd like to add some more SATA drives to make a RAID-5 array. As I understand it, I can't just hook up a SATA port multiplier to any old SATA port, the SATA controller has to support it.
There are plenty of cheap adapters for ps2 and serial that work over USB. For those of us without weird needs, more USB ports would be welcome. HDMI and DVI with a VGA adapter would be useful.
Seriously, this is a very decent CPU, manages to do out of order processing (lolatom) and has VIA's padlock engine built in for all your crypto needs.
This chipset/cpu doesn't seem to bring anything which NVidia Ion 2 can't already do. Ion 2 coupled with a low powered Atom plays anything video using pretty much zero CPU, and it even bitstreams Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA to the receiver, on Linux and Windows. And it's proven and stable. NVidia know this stuff, VIA need to do better. I use a cheap ASUS S1-AT5NM10E (Shity name, good computer) for playback. Even my netbook have Ion 2 (Asus 1015PN), it also plays any video out there. So what will this bring we don't already have?
Why, is he small?
That's great and all, but count me as someone who is now becoming quite indifferent to VIA nowadays. I appreciate that they brought the mini-ITX form factor to the light in the first place, but it seems nowadays they don't try so hard to put out a product to end users. If you can even find any of their dual core mini-ITX motherboards for purchase, you'll find a product that is way overpriced for what it offers. AMD and Intel manage to put something out there for a far more reasonable price.
Also, when exactly will the quad core motherboards come out? Of course, it could be that VIA will once again take its sweet time to release them, then ask too much once again. I don't think I'll be holding my breath.
I have been thinking for a while that you could build your own tablet with one of these boards. Strap a touchscreen to one side and a battery to the other and install some tablet edition of Windows or Linux and it should work pretty well. Certainly more powerful than most tablets available today.
The only issue might be power consumption but it's quite a good trade off for performance and modularity. You could just use a bigger battery anyway.
I care not for your karma and your mod points.
Get a zotac zbox with nvidia onboard card.
Yawn... yeah, wake me up when someone finally starts selling the pico-ITX nVidia ION reference design
http://www.anandtech.com/print/2688
I did replace my tower Linux server with one of those Zotac mini-ITX IONs in a shoebox PC last year. Thanks to the GPU, I can even use it to do some light web browsing, and view videos like you say.
Too bad Intel dorked up ION2, with the 1x PCIe GPU bottleneck.
I've played with the fit-PC too, but with the crap Intel GPU with proprietary driver binary blobs, it's pretty useless. Other parts of the chipset (like the sata controller) is also problematic on older linux distros.
http://www.fit-pc.com/web/
DVI ouptuts work just fine with HDMI inputs.
Unless your TV's HDMI input doesn't have a corresponding analog audio input next to it. Fortunately, the HDMI 2 input on my 32" Vizio does have stereo audio in, for I guess precisely this reason.
VGA is component. It's RGB and not YPbPr, but it's still component. It's been on every PC since the 1990s, and nowadays it's on every TV too. I guess they omit composite because the chipset would have to downscale everything to 480i, but there are $40 VGA-to-composite adapters on sewelldirect.com.
Most of the time, people buy mini-itx because they don't want to see the computer. They want to hide them. If They wanted nice cases, they would have bought ATX cases.
Unless you want to hide the computer in plain sight, the way one would "hide" a game console, and don't want the computer to be XBOX HUEG.
Granted, It's not x86, and the cpu is significantly slower, but with h.264 accelerated decoding, HDMI, small footprint, low cost ($25/$35 for the board!), a focus on Linux support (and therefore, hopefully, robust drivers), and boot from SD, the Raspberry Pi should be able to put a serious dent into Via's HTPC market. It has a LOT of potential, and this is only a 1st gen device.
To be fair, Intel's graphics drivers are all open source. The fit-PCs use a PowerVR graphics core, rebranded as a GMA500.
As it happens I was recently looking at some mini-ITX options, but for doing a DIY home ADSL router.
My router was giving issues and restarting, so was thinking I might need a new one and was most frustrated to see that when it comes to consumer routers, it's typically hit and miss in terms of reliability, so was thinking of maybe building my own.
My conclusion was that while one could do it with these, they are completely overkill for such an application as they're more geared towards HTPC systems.
Nevertheless, it's still somewhat appealing, I would love to make a DIY router which is powerful enough that it would always be plenty powerful and stable enough that it could handle anything you would want on a home router. I would like things like being able to set up a VPN dial in, tunnels and QoS (I would only be able to affect upstream packets I know, but it would still help as more often than not my latency for games is due to upload bandwidth being starved by stuff like peer to peer).
If I recall, I couldn't see one where I could get a riser PCI slot, fanless set up and built in wifi. I would also need to ensure any built wifi card could behave as an AP.
Another product looked promising, namely routerboards, running routerOS, but I have no idea how good the software is and while I found an occasional PCI ADSL2+ card, could find none for mini-PCI which is all that routerboards could take.
I know I could potentially get a regular ADSL modem connected running in bridged mode connected by a LAN cable, but I would far rather have an all in one box since I would probably already need a GB/s switch, less wires and devices I need, the better.
My router has been stable the last few days though, so haven't looked into it deeper, so for now, not changing anything.
I have no idea why someone like highpoint or another hasn't done it yet, but in the case of Mini-ITX, server boards are obviously a great audience. I personally use a Core-i3 Mini-ITX motherboard to run a Windows Home Server installation. But since I have a boot drive and 8 2TB drives in the system, I have to use a secondary controller. At the moment, I'm using a highpoint tech SAS controller which has hardware RAID-5 on it. There is a clear difference between a quality RAID controller and the cheap crap stuff put out by Intel, NVidia and AMD in their chipsets. I'm dreaming of a day when I can buy a single mini-itx motherboard with a Core-i3/5/7 ULV processor that can be effectively passively cooled (tablet chips) and a proper 8 or 16 port RAID controller.