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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.
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.
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.
Can I mod +0? +1 for insightful and -1 for "Dick"?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
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
$85 AMD E-350 APU+MOBO, MINI ITX
So it looks like AMD offers comparable solutions. Intel probably not.
"His name was James Damore."
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.