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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.
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.
Maybe because you responded so fast, but as long as you don't show a list of features you require, you are not going to get much useful response.
They have just brought this one to the market, it is unlikely to feature a full set of bugs. That said, the VIA chipsets have always had quite a strong feature set. It amazed me that the Atom boards did trash the VIA EPIA in sales. The VIA EPIA chipset especially was way way way better than what the Intel chipsets had to offer (and then came nVidia, of course.)
The processor was not that fast, but I've still got this nice fanless board with PCI, SATA and DVI lying around (they were way too late introducing DVI though, don't know what it is with those legacy ports either).
...for some raspberry pi.
Yes but at $89, that is cheaper to replace it twice in a few years than replace the chip in an AMD or Intel board.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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
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.
There are other considerations. Sometimes I want my computer to be quiet. Which is why my current box is an XCube. Another consideration is carbon footprint. If my needs don't require a giant case with lots of cooling and a loud fan, I'd rather save space and be more energy efficient with my needs.
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.
No NVIDIA GPU, but it does have this (FTA):
...and the VX900 “Media System Processor” features the ChromotionHD 2.0 video engine, offering hardware acceleration for VC1, H.264, MPEG-2 and WMV9 HD formats at up to 1080p.
Not sure what the state of that chipset being supported in Linux is, though.
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.
I do. PS/2 is OK for keyboard and mouse, also PS/2+VGA KVM switches are much cheaper than USB ones and there is not much point in using USB for keyboard and mouse.
especially given how common PS/2 devices are.
How common they are? You can't even buy them anymore. They are not made. That you have boxes of them that you can't bring yourself to throw away does not make them common.
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?
You can't? I buy them pretty regularly. If you build and sell systems, there's still a price premium for USB vs. PS/2 input devices. I'd rather buy a quality Logitech keyboard with a PS/2 plug on the end than some crappy generic that just happens to be USB. The sets I'm using these days have a PS/2 keyboard and a USB mouse and I think I pay under $75 for a box of 10 new ones.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
A lot of ITX stuff is used in industry.
PS/2 KVMs are cheap and common as dirt. RS-232 can go much farther than USB and is also super common. Some machine tools still run DOS it is realtime and makes sense for some dedicated controllers and use the Centronics port to interface to hardware.
Imagine that you have a perfectly good $20,000 CNC machine that has a blown controller.... Nice to have a simple pop in replacement. It is all about the market you are in. You still see RS-232, PS/2, and VGA on server motherboards a lot for the same reason.
Actually the only thing I would rather see is the serial port be brought out to an internal header like the printer port is.
Here is a link to how to build your own IR receiver to use with LIRC http://www.lirc.org/receivers.html
And one for transmitters as well http://www.lirc.org/transmitters.html
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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/
Can I mod +0? +1 for insightful and -1 for "Dick"?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
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.
You still see RS-232, PS/2, and VGA on server motherboards a lot for the same reason.
We just put in a bunch of new equipment for airline shared use situations. Almost all the peripherals... keyboard, card swipers, boarding pass readers, printers, etc... run on serial connections. Even after all these years, RS-232 is the go-to connection for stuff that has to be up 24/7.As the vendor put it "Hey, it's a clean technology, it works, and airlines will keep using it until someone comes up with something better". You could say the same thing about VGA and PS2 connections. Businesses don't like change when it comes to their gear.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Actually, it's handy for most high-end AV applications. Most of the AV switchers, high end AV receivers, and TVs and such have RS-232 inputs so they can be controlled by commands.
The reason for this is so home-control systems like Crestons and such can control and set up the devices as necessary. So they have a boatload of RS-232 ports to control devices with.
For lesser home theatres, you use a Harmony.
$85 AMD E-350 APU+MOBO, MINI ITX
So it looks like AMD offers comparable solutions. Intel probably not.
"His name was James Damore."
Most televisions will accept analog audio from an HDMI input. The problem is that some TVs will not allow you manually manage this input, and will switch to it depending on whether the HDMI signal carries audio. Some DVI outputs are actually using HDMI capable TMDS transmitters, and potentially sending an empty audio stream to the TV over the DVI output. In the past, I have had to force-feed the nVidia X11 drivers a forged EDID block to make it think the television did not have audio capability, so it didn't try to send audio out the DVI port and prevent the use of analog audio on the television.
Atom trashed EPIA because it was:
1. cheaper
2. faster
3. properly supported by the manufacturer
My first and immediate thought upon reading the title was "why would VIA even bother in a post-Atom world ?". If I want a cheap build, I go with a standard Intel Atom board. If I want rich features, I spring an extra $50 for an ION board. VIA's offering probably sits somewhere in-between, but given the company's history, they would practically have to give them away for me to even look twice.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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.
Most modern atom boards do support 4G of ram, while you're right about better performance, it comes at a price - requires active cooling (haven't seen a cheap board without it), and the cpu has a higher TDP - in fact, if you do need performance, you get a better deal (performance per watt) with an intel core i3. I agree that the GPU is somewhat crappy, but many atom applications are business-oriented and not consumer oriented. No need for divx on a POS or on a gateway. Btw, I do have a single-core atom (210 or something) and I can watch HD video without any issues - just not 1080p.