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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.
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?
I'm guessing the VIA failmode is it doesn't support VDPAU. VDPAU offloads video codec decoding to the video card, so probably a pentium-75 could play 1080p as long as its got a good enough card.
Get a zotac zbox with nvidia onboard card. Talk about a boring install, compared to ye olden days. Open the box, stick in a small silent SSD (I'm using less than 4 gigs at this time). I believe I stuck 2 gigs ram in there too. Set up for Debian netboot, which in my case was enable ethernet boot on the zbox, add it's mac to DHCP and friends, boot and install plain vanilla Debian. Reconfigure the zbox to stop netbooting and boot off its internal drive. Install NVIDIA drivers, add the debian multimedia repository, apt-get install the stuff you need for a mythtv FE, modify the files necessary to auto-log-you-in-and-dump-you-into-mythtv and you're done. Configure mythtv in "config" "setup" "tv" and have it use vdpau for all playback. I believe I burned about two hours on it from cutting the cardboard box open to watching TV recordings. It helps that I've automated all the system-wide config work in Puppet, I had to manually install the nvidia drivers but stuff like my ratpoison and autologin and all that was all handled by the Puppet. This was circa 6 months ago times may have changed.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Uhhh...dude? Why would you go with Atom when you can have a Brazos board for the same price and have a BETTER CPU and GPU? i've have built a few brazos HTPCs as well as sold Brazos netbooks and all in ones (I was so impressed with the netbooks I sold my MSI Wind and got a EEE Brazos for myself) and frankly Brazos stomps the living shit out of Atom.
With atom you are limited to 2Gb whereas Brazos will take 8Gb (great for video buffering BTW, watching HD video with 8Gb on my netbook is sweet!) and Intel still hasn't made a decent GPU for Atom and cut their noses off to spite their face by cutting out nvidia from making new ION whereas with Brazos you have a Radeon HD6250 built in that accelerates ALL the major formats including DivX and flash as well as H.26x, max wattage is only 18w for the dual core 1.6GHz so no real need for fans and the Brazos is an out of order CPU instead of the crappy in order you get with Atom.
So if you were building an HTPC while saddle it with a craptastic Atom when you can get a nice brazos board for $80 after rebate and it even comes with a PCIe X16 in case you want more performance later or want to go hybrid crossfire.
I have to agree on Via though, never have seen their drivers be anything but flaky and their boards iffy. they just don't seem to be well engineered and tend to screw up more, at least from what I've seen.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.