MiniITX

po0k

Anyone seen these for sale in Ireland?

Myg

Ive looked around a bit and couldnt find any myself, im sure you could order from www.mini-itx.com and they do deliver to ireland, but their prices for the Newest model (VIA EPIA M 9000) of M-itx motherboards are quite high. I am not sure about their reliability or customer support, but if you really want one, it seems the most convienient place. BTW if your looking for a cheap case (Mini-ItX cases are rediculously expensive), i suggest you make your own

spaczed

oh while ont the topic, theres a good article on this in the hardware section of this months (february) issue of Personal Computer World (PCW) magazine. worth a look if you're in easons or wherever. compares mini-atx and micro-atx and cases. Interesting stuff -i'm tempted to save up and use one as a mp3 portal, or something.

Myg

Ricardo, I hope you know that all but the newst model mini-itx motherboards use heatsinks instead of fans on their CPUs. There is a great video that shows how the processor used in the latest series can run without heatsink/fan. Though i Do agree the newest mobo is quite expensive.

http://ads.viaarena.com/c3/thermals.zip

spaczed, these motherboards are made specifically to cater to the home-entertainment crowd, who like the combination of high quality audio/DVD/Mp* playback all in a small board 17*17cm. I would suggest getting a 2nd hand celeron computer to use for keeping files/Network misc.

spaczed

uh huh, i know, they're pretty well specced, but a good price though. The tv-out and sp-dif make it pretty sweet for a home entertainment hub. What I meant was that if i ever found the time or the money :rolleyes: to make it , i'd consider having a small pc which would be ideal (small, quiet) for a dvd player or just to surf the net in my living room ( wireless mouse, keyboard maybe). It would be ideal to use as a system as which to run as a mp3 machine in that one could use it to select you album or playlist whatever and have it output to your sound system and play away. or even play cds. The only problem about that is if you were using windows to play your mp*s it would be kinda cumbersome and take forever to load, which wouldn't be A+ for a 'turn-it-on-and-play' kinda system, even tho its would be absoultely perfect for dvds. i suppose linux would be quicker (i don't know most ppl here know a lot more about linux than me!) there are mp3 solutions you buy to access your collection-but hey who wants to spend money on something when you can build it yourself!

I was thinking about it and the main way i could think of to have a quick mp3 player and a dvd/net machine was to either have dual boot lilo to a stripped between linux and your main os, or between dos and your os. Dos is pretty handy because shutting it off is the touch of a button- contol/ui is pretty crap though. a boot loader would add to boot up time- you could buy a disk selector/switch thing either-they're great pieces of kit if ya wanted to go to the trouble. Actually there's quite a few of those mp3 player projects on the net most are small linux distros.

i kinda started thinkin about this cos my sister asked me could she have a pc in her room to play her mp3s on. i had an old pentium 133 and a real old tv out card, and a 4x cd drive (courtesy of a skip at the back of my school-i'd great fun that weekend!) and i set it up to boot to dos>mpxplay and i was goin try use mouse for input. in the end i couldn't disable onboard graphics tho :mad: .

i'm gonna do it with a similar system when i have time though

megavolt

I've bought one of those mini-itx boards from www.mini-itx.com. It was pretty quick and I wouldn't fault them at all. The only thing about them is that they buy everything in bulk and so everything you order apart from the motherboard comes wrapped in bubble wrap.

I also bought a cubid case, but am in the middle of making my own. I tried it connected to a tv with mame and a few retro Coin Op games and it was great fun.

What I intend to do is try it out in a few different scenarios, ie server, entertainment centre etc and try to work out it's best use.

I'll keep you posted.

noog

I have a fanless epia 5k with a morex cubid case from mini-itx.com

It has completely changed my life.

at the moment the *only* noise in my case is my very quiet 40gb 5200rpm drive


it struggles to play divx properly on the 530mhz epia, so you might want to shell out extra for the 600mhz or the 900mhz if you can afford it...

Myg

Nice.... I was hoping to combine it with a PCI riser card and a Xcard, anyone have any experience with the Xcard for playback preformance.

zerokarma

You could also try these mini pc's, i think the out perform the ITX ones.

http://www.stealthcomputer.com/littlepc.htm

http://www.littlepc.com/





They even have a fanless one:

daveJAM

Komplett have the Via Nemehiah's. ~€180 iirc.

Anyone know when the nano-itx boards will be out?

RicardoSmith

Maplins stock some of these...