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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?
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.
What the fuck is any of this shit? You need a computer, you go to Best Buy.
I used an EPIA motherboard for a settop box for ages, til the case died. I liked it, it had a built-in S-Video out and a PCI slot for my tv card. Bolted right up to my TV & my sat feed. It was only a 900 HHz motherboard, but it worked.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Unfortunately Best Buy kind of sucks for this sort of machine. Even when they did have the Revos, they tended to hide them so people didn't discover that you could compute with a $200 device rather than a $500 one or $1000 one.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
*PS/2
Depends what you use.
I still have an original EPIA board that's still running after MANY years of use in a school, then used as a project-kit for myself (it outlived the school's age at which they replace). Never once witnessed a crash on it in its entire life (it's currently booting Linux 2.4 off a CF card, I think - been so long since I needed to fiddle, I don't even remember).
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.
Just like bandwidth in a station wagon, the best computing power comes from a van full of mini-ITX systems?
Back in my days writing Windows drivers for add-on boards we ended up detecting VIA chipsets and turning off all features other than basic PCI, because anything complex like AGP never worked right; after that it was stable, just substantially slower than it should have been.
I wouldn't touch VIA, irregardless of the OS. If VIA manufactored cooling, it would catch fire.
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?
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/
You need to go to Fry's Electronics (West Coast, California thing) and you'll see them on the shelf. I bought an Artigo A1100, I wanted to make a sort of low cost linux media out of it. Love the form factor. Unfortuneatly Via refuses to make working linux video drivers for it, so I Ioaded it with Windows XP. You can use the chrome9 OSS offering, but you'll miss out on some essential hardware acceleration and some 3D stuff.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
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.
What is this, 2001? Just remove that junk and give me some extra USB ports.
Why? Lots of people still use VGA and PCI. Most motherboards have USB port headers so you can easily expand, and even if it doesn't, a USB expansion card is, what, $15 bucks?
What's the point of buying small cheap hardware if it requires you to buy a bunch of other stuff as well?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I think he means power supply. Well for mini-itx, the cases are so small that they normally have custom power supplies and wiring. Once it goes, it is hard to repair and easier just to get another case. I had a case that went out in me. The problem wasn't the power supply as I had an identical case for parts. Something else in the case didn't work and I'm not enough of an electronics expert to start digging into it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The power switch on the front panel died. Dunno what kind of voodoo they used on it, but I was unable to replace it. Strangest thing, though, is it's supposed to be just a momentary contact normally open switch.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
My experience with VIA is more with the parent. I have two EPIA boards. They are the same model and I got them at the same time. They both crash. However one crashes every few weeks while the other few days if I'm lucky. The consistency for me hasn't been there.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
Yes, I also think that it's possible that VIA finally got their shit together with these boards.
My local Frys never has the cheap boxes in stock. Never fails. Doesn't matter if it's a low profile machine or not.
Now the problem with Via is that it's Via.
Lack of driver support or community operation in Linux is rather moot.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.