Mini-ITX Computing For Everyone

An anonymous reader writes "So you have decided that you want an ITX system. Whether it's just to look cool or because you need to reclaim the desk space. Most people wouldn't know where to start when creating their system. Fear no more because XYZComputing.com has created a step by step process on how they created their system. Based on an MII10000 and using a USB Pen to load up Puppy Linux. No details are omitted so if you are new to Mini-ITX and do not have a clue what you need or where to start then this would certainly be a good place to start."

Re:seems like a lot of work

[TruePaige]

Some people enjoy building computers, as some people may enjoy watching a football game. Plus the savings money wise is very nice in the pocket. I assume you just don't get it. ~_^

How stable is it?

[rsilvergun]

I went through 2 via boards on linux before settling on an Nvidia board because I just couldn't get the damn things stable (to be fair, the soyo board was stable so long as I didn't plug anything into the pci slots).

The other thing I'd love to know is if it can do full screen, high res divx in linux, or if there's a mini itx case that can. I figure most of these boards aren't going to run an accelerated X, but I haven't done enough research yet.

mATX ITX

[Fortress]

For my money, the mATX boards are a much better value. Cheaper, mainstream processor support, support for the usual PCI/PCIe/AGP peripherals means a more powerful, robust, upgradeable system. Plus, you can get cases that look like a piece of stereo equipment and can be unobtrusive in your living room.

IMHO, ITX is better suited for embedded systems, not a more general purpose computer. Unless you have a very specific, limited use (like a MythTV frontend), you'll almost always be better served getting an mATX-based system.

As with everything, YMMV.

the fine print

[The Fun Guy]

From the last page of TFA:

With a few additions, like a hard drive and optical drive, a computer like this one could easily be a great work computer.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement....

Re:No details emitted

[nfarrell]

Why can't the editors do something about the grammatical and spelling mistakes of the articles they deem fit to publish? The more errors slashdot publishes, the more it'll get, as the geeks will think it's correct usage. Admittedly, if the editors can't even manage to prevent dupes every few days, I don't have high hopes of them being on top of this.

It's particularly sad when you see all the effort being put into getting the HTML semi-compliant. If only they could do a few more things about the content.

If they really HAVE to leave the original contributers' words verbatim, at least highlight or otherwise indicate the words which are wrong. We can laugh when you read 'site' and know it should be 'cite', but I'm sure there are times when we don't even realise the error is there until we've RTFA. And only rarely (and too late) will an update be posted to the original story.

If only we could moderate the editors...

Disapointed by the old Epia-M (@933)

[obarthelemy]

I have an old Epia-m @933MHz that I tried to revive just yesterday. This is an old version of the Epia, I do think (and hope) the newer ones are better.

It took my 3 tries to get Windows up and running (correct steps are 1- update BIOS, 2- Install Windows, 3-Install drivers, 4- Windows Update a few times), while keeping your fingers crossed.

It hangs while lauching powerDVD and WinDVD, and VLC is too jerky to use (at 640x480x32@75)

I checked, it still costs 2 to 3 times more than a regular MATX board+proc, for about 1/2 to 1/4 the power. Plus, cases are VERY expensive if you want something that look nice, plus a low profile DVD reader/writer (check www.mini-itx.com).

It's kind of cool to have, and makes a nice conversation piece for all my nerd friends, but usage value is very low. I don't think I could make any kind of server of it. Maybe a router, a basic Windows Office PC, or a linux experimentation platform (but drivers are an issue).

It IS incredibly small, very silent, and does work.

Re:Easier process

[puetzc]

About a year ago I built a silent computer based on a mini_ITX for my wife. Her requests were 1) Small and 2) Silent. It went together easily and has done an excellent job of general basic service. It installed Debian (first testing, and now Sarge) without any undue problems. Three months ago, I bought a Mac mini for my daughter to take to school. Everything she has tried has worked perfectly. If the Mac had been available when my wife needed a new computer, I probably wouldn't have bothered with the homebuilt, as the mini is about the same price and is more powereful. Stability hasn't been an issue with either one.

Re:seems like a lot of work

[Wavicle]

My server at home, which sits on a static IP address, is a mini-itx based machine. It provides me with: web hosting, email hosting, storage, inside network services and firewalls outside access to my TiVo. Why did I do this with a mini-itx instead of a shuttle? Well, there are several disadvantages to Shuttle over Mini-itx:

• Noise. The shuttle will likely produce a lot more. The only moving part on my server is the hard drive platters, and they are hermetically sealed and use fluid dynamic bearings. As hard drives go, they are whisper quiet. I've bought a lot of fans in my time, even some rather expensive ultra-quiet ones. Given enough time, all of them eventually get dust in the bearings and start making a racket.
• Size. Shuttle is small, this thing is smaller.
  
• Heat. There is not a single fan running on my server. The hottest component by far is the hard drives.
  
• Power. This goes along with heat. The power supply's peak sustained output is 60W. I'd be suprised if the unit consumed more than 25W except during hard drive spin up.
  
• Battery back up lifetime. This goes along with power. A standard consumer UPS will run this thing for many hours. No, I haven't tested how long. It has survived 3 hour power outtages.
  

Put all this together, and I can hide the server in a closet and forget about it. Just need a power drop and two network connections.

My (negative) experience with mini-itx

[zerojoker]

Basically I spent a lot of money and ended up very disappointed. I wanted to create some kind of multimedia/streaming-box, capable of turning into a complete PVR for DVB-T oder DVB-S. The problem is: To have a smooth DivX - Playbay in any event you have to go for the 1GHz CPU at least. But even though the VIA EPIA platform is considered low-power, the CPU is cooled by this noisy 6000rpm spinning fan. Since the VIA EPIA platform is completely custom, it is very very difficult to replace this fan (and get another fan with appropriate cooling capabilities) or even cool this thing without a fan. Sure there are ways, but the point is that you're gonna spend much much more compared to a standard ATX oder microATX Board with a nice medium power CPU (Athlon XP, mobile Sempron) and an CPU Cooler with a low-spinning 80mm fan. The system turned out to be extremely hot (even with the stock fan), slow (sometimes smooth DivX playbay was not possible) too noisy to be a working solution. Linux was a problem, too, because the MPEG2 Accelerator Chip wasn't supported and DVD-Playbay was not possible because of this (the CPU alone is too slow for a smooth DVD playback). My 2 cents: If you don't really really need the form factor and want to build a nice PVR, go for a typical standard ATX system.

Re:Budget Breakdown

[Nik13]

I bought a readily asembled PC at bestbuy (yeah i know!) 2 weeks ago for this much. It's much smaller than any of my normal towers (in every dimension), quite acceptable. Looks better than every PC I've had built with 150$ cases, better build than all these "nice" systems I've built (with expensive cases, asus boards and all)... Came with a P4 3.06GHz, 512MB of DDR2, a 200GB SATA HD, DVD+-RW DL with lightscribe and all, pretty kick-ass video (for onboard video at least-the new intel 915), 7.1 ch digital audio, usb2/fw and all. media readers at the front, everything one could ask for. (I threw in an extra 200GB and 1GB of ram and it makes a GREAT development PC). That even included a legit winblows license, keyboard, mouse and even shipping!

I had been looking at making something similarly spec'ed using an Athlon64 (assembled myself) but couldn't even remotely match the price... The Athlon 64 3000+ with venice core, dfi lanparty board, decent brand ram, case, video card and all always ended up costing 1000$ (CDN) at least - using the cheapest parts on the web across the country. Yes, it would have been cheaper using an ECS board and no name everything but quality wise... I'd rather save the troubles of having a PC to fix every second day.

I don't mind paying a bit more to have something smaller, but this thing is a mere 1GHz... Even if it's more efficient (in instr/clock cycles), it's still slow and under spec'ed (no HD???)

So either you opt for:
1) slightly bigger case
or
2) slow CPU, no HD, no DVD burner, slow video (haven't checked if sound is decent), plus keyboard/mouse and shipping on all parts (separately?), time to put it together (hopefully nothing DOA, then you gotta deal with that...)

Anyways. Sounds like buying parts at full retail price nowadays just isn't worth it anymore. After this I doubt I'll bother assembling a PC anytime soon. Sad thought really.

Re:Easier process

[CastrTroy]

I'm using a P2 266 at home. Really, all I do is browse the web, type some documents, a little bit of development for fun. It's pretty sufficient. For games I have a GameCube. Seriously, if you can't wait a couple seconds for your web browser to open up, you need some patience. I understand having a better computer at work, but for at home, I think most people should be fine with a computer like mine.

it's a shame

[idlake]

Mini ITX pioneered the small form factors, quiet desktops, and Nano ITX was supposed to go a step further. But complete and assembled Mini ITX systems are shipped only by a few obscure vendors and expensive for their limited performance, and Nano ITX has been MIA since 2003.

Apple, meanwhile, has grabbed the small, quiet desktop market with the Mac Mini, which is a beautiful piece of hardware, but is a bit limited in terms of software (pretty much OS X, since Linux isn't all that well supported).

Let's hope that Apple will come out with a Mac Mini/86, and that other PC vendors will clone the concept quickly. 640k may not be all you need, but a quart-sized PC ought to be all you need.

Re:Easier process

[burnin1965]

At first I was going to disagree with you, however, after checking the details on the Mac Mini specs it is impressive. I was expecting the mini-ITX to beat the Mac Mini hands down on power efficiency but it looks like they are on par with one another.

You can still beat the Mac Mini price by well over $100 if you piece together a mini-ITX system with similar specs, but the Mac will have a much more powerful CPU and GPU. If you don't need the extra CPU and GPU power then the cost savings may make the mini-ITX a better solution.

I've used mini-ITX systems in several applications, webservers, firewalls, wifi access points, etc., but I will definitely consider the Mac Mini hardware in future projects that may need more oompf. Especially since it appears it is quite easy to install linux over the top of OSX. While OSX is a nice OS (works great on my dual 1GHz G4) but it would waste resources on a headless box.

burnin

Re:seems like a lot of work

[Wavicle]

There's really not much to tell, the mini-itx has most of the peripherals on board. It's an EPIA MII 6000 mainboard sporting a 600MHz processor that I think I've clocked down to 533... or maybe it always ran at 533... Anyway, /proc/cpuinfo assures me it's at 533 MHz.

I'd like to say I had a good reason for only putting a 256MB DIMM on the board, but the truth is I had a 256MB DIMM harvested from another machine upgrade lying around, so I didn't even shop for something larger. There is only one DIMM slot on the board though.

Since that board has only one network interface, the lone PCI slot on the machine has another network card in it. I seem to remember that the motherboard had some problems with many PCI NICs, I had to shuffle through a few before finding one that worked.

The hard disks are samsung spinpoint V series 160GB drives which are raid mirrors of one another. Each drive is on a separate IDE cable (the Linux RAID HOWTO said that putting both drives on the same IDE cable was a sure way to kill performance). I'm sure someone out there is incredulous with the meager storage I have, but to be fair when I built the machine a couple years ago, 160GB was a fair sized drive and I haven't filled the drive up anyway.

It has an old CD-ROM I had lying around attached to it, but I don't think it has been used since the OS was installed.

The power supply I got from mini-box.com I believe. It has two parts: one that looks like a laptop power supply and another that attaches to the mini-itx board.

The server is running Gentoo Linux. I have several machines pick up and do a distcc to help the poor server through the big compiles. I've got my own set of iptables running as well as dhcpd, samba, apache2, tomcat, exim, sshd, courier-imap, postgres and named. Sadly, uptime right now is only 111 days. Every so often I want to download the latest Fedora Core, Knoppix, MAME ROMs or whatever and I'll use the server to do that as well (soaks a lot of CPU cycles to do bit torrent though). It's cheaper to have the server download the latest fedora DVDs than to leave one of my bigger machines on overnight.

The only thing it's not doing anymore is print serving. Although it could, the printer is doing fine attached to another box right now.