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Hardware Technology

Tom's Hardware Reviews VIA Mini-ITX Board 188

Posted by CowboyNeal from the incredible-shrinking-cases dept.
SlightlyMadman writes "Tom's Hardware has finally taken notice of the popular Mini ITX form factor, in this article. Sounds like these are the way to go for a new PC, so long as you don't have a deathmatch scheduled anytime soon." While the form factor on these boards are great, one gives up a lot in the way of ability to upgrade, since many parts are now soldered onto the motherboard.
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Tom's Hardware Reviews VIA Mini-ITX Board More

Tom's Hardware Reviews VIA Mini-ITX Board

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  • state of linux support on mini-itx m series (Score:5, Informative)

    by xtra ( 24662 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @01:46PM (#5622741) Homepage
    if you want to know the current linux support on the mini-itx m series try this url : http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.cfm?catid=2 8&threadid=33324 [viaarena.com]

    in short
    X yes but not with hardware acceleration

    • with minimal Linux support, and few PCI slots.

    • Ethernet driver (Score:2, Informative)

      by hellgate ( 85557 )
      What the thread doesn't mention is that if you plan to put
      any serious network load on an EPIA system, you want Linux
      2.4.21pre6 or later. via-rhine 1.17 dies under load.
    • I've been hoping that this thread would somehow make it to Slashdot. Hopefully, enough interested Linux users will let VIA know how much of a mistake they're making by not properly supporting our choice of operating system.

      It really bothers me to see that VIA is claiming [viaarena.com] to support Linux, when this support is so poor. This review [linuxathome.net] at Linuxathome.net only makes matters worse, since the reviewer tested most features on Windows, and verified Linux support by merely installing RedHat!

      I really want to buy one

      • I built one this week -- EPIA 5000, Cubid 2688R, IBM 180GXP. Linux support is fine under 2.4.20, and I have not seen the network problems people are reporting with the stock via-rhine.c (but if you do, via ships an open-source driver with the system). X is slow but works fine. I built the box for a network server and audio component -- its great for that purpose. Sound works great under Alsa (but google "Eden PciRetry" if you plan on running X). Cheers, Greg
      • What irks me is that there's not a -march=c3 target in recent GCC releases. The C3 currently works best when you use '-m486 -m3dnow -mmmx' which is nasty. VIA needs to kick a GCC developer a few thousand and a few books so GCC can get a proper target for VIA's products. Until there's proper scheduling and cache-management for this processor (on the compiler end) everything is gonna feel REAL SLOW on it.
    • It's not quite that bad. The original EPIA
      boards use an integrates graphics/northbridge,
      the graphics core is a Trident Cyberblade I1.
      The xree86 acceleration works fine for this and
      is nice, but you are limited to 1280x1024x16.

      The newer EPIA-M use an integrated northbridge/
      graphics called the CLE266. The graphics core
      is some internal thing to VIA called Castlerock.

      There's no external public documentation for
      castlerock, but there is a binary-only xfree86
      available from VIA. I've been using this with
      redhat 8

  • Small form factor users (Score:5, Informative)

    by rf0 ( 159958 ) <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Saturday March 29, 2003 @01:46PM (#5622742) Homepage
    The nice thing about small form factor is that there are really quiet and can go into the louge. For example I have one which I use to stream MP3's from my main PC (via WiFI) into my Hifi. Also if you are like most geeks and have lying around you can make a new PC for about $150. I would also recommend Mini ITX [mini-itx.com]. Cool service and quick delivery

    Rus

  • so thats what it looks like on the other side.. (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    i guess i have always been the kind of guy who likes 2'6" tall towers humming under my desk.
  • then why are you doing a deathmatch. If you are looking for power though, bigger is usually better. after all you wouldn't race a mini cooper against a T-bird, would you? Scarry thing to me is, frying the motherboard via heat death with little breathing room... what happens if you accidently put something near the fan, the next thing you know you have a new paperweight.... which you'd have to replace the entire board and not the processor... But some of the boards are cooled passivly... so that is less

  • Incredibly cheap! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by maan ( 21073 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @01:47PM (#5622748)
    I hadn't heard about this form factor before, but a quick search on newegg.com shows that it's incredibly cheap! A VIA motherboard with a 1Ghz processor is only 170 something bucks!! Add 40-50$ for memory, 80$ for a decent sized hard drive, and 50-100$ for a case, and you have a complete and small computer. I'm thinking that you add a small lcd screen and a remote control (stick the IR receiver on the front of the case), and this is a perfect and incredibly cheap divx/mp3 player, connected to a TV and stereo system.

    Maan

    • Re:Incredibly cheap! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 29, 2003 @01:57PM (#5622796)
      I've built a couple of these. Great info and project ideas at www.mini-itx.com [mini-itx.com] (creative name, eh?) and SPCR [silentpcreview.com] keeps up with much of this hardware.
      I'm using a passive cooling model, a seagate barracuda, and a case with an fanless external power supply (blister pack) for my entertainment server, less than whisper, almost silent. Great server for an audiotron.
    • They used one of these motherboards in the WallMart $200 Lindows PC, although now they seem to have switched to AMD Durons.
    • Well, you could buy a k7s5a and put a 1.3GHz Duron in it for around $80 total, and you'd still wipe the floor with the Mini-ITX.
      • Seems that you fail to realize that you're paying for the small form factor, fan-less system, and everything integrated.

        This is great with an external powersupply!

    • Re:Incredibly cheap! ($49 is the real price) (Score:4, Informative)

      by jbridges ( 70118 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @03:19PM (#5623191)
      NOT $170!! That's not cheap!

      PC-Chips M787CL+ V3.0 Socket 370/667M CPU/SIS/A&V&L&M/MATX/Bulk Motherboard for $49

      $49!!! Now that's cheap! I've done several systems, you can replace the fan/heatsink with a Zalman northbridge heatsink, then run it with only the power supply fan. The only noise audible is the harddrive whine.

      CPU: SOCKET 370, BUILT IN VIA C3 1GIGA PRO CPU ON BOARD (CYRIX 734MHZ)
      CHIPSET: SIS630S (FSB133)
      MEMORY: 2 DIMMS FOR PC133 SDRAM UP TO 1G
      SLOTS: 3PCI, 1AMR
      AUDIO: AC'97 ON BOARD
      VIDEO: INTEGRATED ADVANCED 128BIT 2D/3D GRAPHIC ENGINE
      LAN: INTEGRATED IN SIS 630E (ON BOARD)
      MODEM: 1AMR CARD
      MICRO ATX, BULK

  • Why not just get a laptop (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Drunken Coward ( 574991 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @01:49PM (#5622759)
    If they're not very upgradeable, why not that much more expensive and they include a screen, keyboard, and pointer.

  • Crap (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ryanr ( 30917 ) <ryan@thievco.com> on Saturday March 29, 2003 @01:54PM (#5622784) Homepage Journal
    The review basically says they can't keep up for playing DVDs or streaming video. There goes my interest in them. At least, not without some hardware assist... I suppose one could try a video card that can offload the decoding. That's how the Tivo gets away with using such a low-end CPU, right?

    • Re:Crap (Score:3, Informative)

      by xtra ( 24662 )
      i just bought a m1000 and i can say that if you use a dvd player with hardware acceleration support (no linux support yet) than it can keep up (about 30 to 40% cpu usage)
      • I assume you mean the M10000? Cool, I didn't realize they were available yet. That's with the built-in MPEG decoder? Out of curiousity, have you tried playing raw DVD files across a network yet, and/or MPEG4/Divx?

        • Re:Crap (Score:2, Informative)

          by cymen ( 8178 )
          Be sure to read up on the M10000 as Via didn't put in the CPU core that they had spec'ed for the initial release. Maybe by now they've released the new core.

    • Re:Not Crap (Score:2, Informative)

      by Linknoid ( 46137 )
      I bought one of these back in November, I'm planning to get a good sound card for recording and a CD-RW and use it for live recordings, but until I can afford that:

      When I went to visit my parents at Christmas, I didn't have room or time to take my full tower case with me. But I pulled my hard drive (on which I had already downloaded EIPA drivers) on my main machine and took the EIPA instead. I had a big collection of DS9 episodes in various formats (DivX, wsf, other .avi, maybe even mpeg). Anyway, I di

      • Thanks for the feedback. Couple of questions: What were you using for a display? TV or VGA? (though, I'm not sure that matters for performance...) What OS are you using? If it's Windows, the driver should be able to use the MPEG2 decoder to help with DVDs, yes? Or does your model not have that video hardware? The reason I ask is because I would tend to think it would play DVDs better, since it wouldn't be 100% CPU for the decoding.

        Good to know that even the 533 does a decent job with soft codecs, th

        • Re:Not Crap (Score:2, Informative)

          by Linknoid ( 46137 )
          OK, here's the answers:

          I was using VGA for output, for some reason I couldn't enable the TV output, I still haven't figured out why, but I only tried a couple times. I was using it under Windows 98, and when I tried playing DVDs, I used PowerDVD with hardware accelleration, and it was kind of jerky. One thing I might mention, I was using PC100 memory instead of PC133 memory, so that might have made things slower. But DVDs were far worse than the "soft codec" decoding. Like I said, it had problems with

  • Good firewall (Score:4, Informative)

    by markclong ( 575822 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @01:56PM (#5622795)
    I own one of the 800 MHz Mini-ITX boards. With a Compact Flash card as a hard drive, a little bit of RAM and a reduced FreeBSD [neon1.net] operating system you can have a good firewall, DHCP server, DNS server or anything you want. They are very quite and can be placed in a drawer or small cabinet. I have tried Windows XP and it can play mp3s and movies fairly well. The newer versions are better for multimedia.

  • There is a more cost effective alternative... (Score:5, Informative)

    by vwpau227 ( 462957 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @01:59PM (#5622804) Homepage
    I've been doing a bit of development (for one of my clients) using the Mini Micro ATX Mainboard-based systems from Elitegroup (ECS). The mainboard that I've been using is the EVEm mainboard in the ECS IN22 system (the "U-Buddie" system as they call it).

    The system that I have been using features a C3 processor at 733Mhz (the "1GigaPro" as they call it) and it has the VIA PLE133 chipset and it works great... I have had no stability or reliability issues so far, and we have purchased 10 of them over the past month or so.

    The best news is that the system, which comes as a package in a sleek black and silver case, is cheap. Very cheap. The whole system with mainboard, case, power supply, 10 GB notebook hard disk drive, 24X CD-ROM, 56K modem riser, on-board 10/100 NIC and 128MB RAM is only about USD $199. Compared with the Mini ITX equiped systems, there is a nearly 33% savings for the exact same specifications. They both even use the same PLE133 chipset that is mentioned in the Tom's Hardware article for the EPIA C3 mainboard.

    Slashdot users may also be please to note that the system comes pre-loaded with a Linux distribution called ThizLinux that is quite user-friendly and easy to configure.

    Mini-ITX systems are great, but I think the Mini Micro ATX systems, like the ones based on the EVEm from ECS are a better value, giving nearly identical performance at a lower price.

  • It is coming (Score:4, Insightful)

    by stevenp ( 610846 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @01:59PM (#5622807)
    The real revolution will start when the MicroATX boards start coming in consumer devices, without the customer knowing it. So your next DVD player may have one of these inside, run Linux and be able to play Ogg, DivX, Quake, Freecell and Minesweeper.

  • why I'd like one of these in my car (Score:4, Insightful)

    by timothy ( 36799 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @01:59PM (#5622808) Journal
    to start with, I just put a little invertor in my car, under the front passenger seat. Good for charging laptops, and anything else which craves electric power. (I hate cig-lighter adapters, besides which I have too little incentive to bother replacing my current -- broken -- one.)

    The basic reasons I'd like a small, low-power computer in my car:

    - recording web cam output. I have a currently unused webcam I'd like to point out the front window. Ideally, I'd like to have ones in all directions ...

    - audio playback. Changing in-flight the discs of an 8-hour audiobook on CD is annoying. Choosing a playlist (of the same discs, converted to oggs) before starting to drive is much simpler.

    - GPS display. Where am I, and why aren't I where I thought I was?

    Those are the top 3; there are other reasons too (keep a wireless router there, and be able to multiplex connections when there's some truly ubiquitous wireless access to speak up; play games when stopped for whatever reason, have a microphone for recording oddball thoughts while driving; use it as an audio TiVO for recording Prairie Home Companion as I listen, etc).

    The VIA boards look nice for this kind of application, both because they won't strain my invertor and because they're very small. (And the built-in ports simplify things ...) A small case, the smallest LCD I can find, a little hard drive ... Seems about all that's necessary.

    timothy

    • Wouldn't hitting a pothole do bad things to the hard drive?
      • Wouldn't hitting a pothole do bad things to the hard drive?

        One could always go with a 1 gig microdrive, and keep music and data on a cd-r. That also has the bonus of being nearly completely silent (which isn't as important in a noisy car, but still nice).

      • I know this is late,
        but for posterities sake,
        I tell my drive's fate. :)

        I had a 160 GB disk in a box on my front seat for about a year, and I didn't drive carefully, and the drive is still running.
    • ...to start with, I just put a little invertor in my car, under the front passenger seat.

      I know this is a little offtopic, but don't most computers run off of DC, at varying voltages less than 12? (Well, Nominal car voltage is something like 14V I think, but close enough)

      Wouldn't it be possible to wire a computer more directly into the car, maybe with a few resistors and perhaps a DC to DC converter, to 'clean up' the power?

      I have a power inverter in my car, and it's great, and the most readily availa
      • My own laptop will not run directly off car power, as it requires 18vdc input. This is not uncommon on new laptops.

        That said, components designed for desktop pcs use anything from + and - 12 volts for hard drives, through +/- 5 volts for most logic. There are other voltage levels as well to support cpu and memory in a way that will keep them from burning up.

        The biggest problem is that you would need to come up with a way to regulate the various voltage levels you feed to the motherboard as the load for th
    • You should check out Norhtec's stuff [norhtec.com]. I haven't tried them (yet), but for what you're talking about you might be interested in their S3 based MicroServer, less features but less juice and smaller than Mini-ITX systems (which they also have).
  • This is also small form factor, and has simpler power requirements than ATX. May be more expensive, though, but it _is_ a standard which has been around for a while. You can actually expand these a bit. You can get these boards equiped with pentiums on down to NEC V-25s (whoo-hoo 10 big MHZ!).

    • Re:What about PC/104? (Score:3, Informative)

      by vwpau227 ( 462957 )
      PC/104 is great, but it's very expensive! The platform doesn't have a lot to offer in terms of Price/Performance ratio.

      For example: Advantech's PCM-3350 PC/104 module with an optional PCMCIA PC/104 adapter and RAM is nearly $400. That's without a case or power supply. That's a lot of money for a GX1-300 processor (about the speed of a Intel Celeron 300). Then you have to get a notebook hard disk drive or a CF card for the data storage, as well as SO-DIMM RAM (i.e. notebook style RAM). That's big bucks

  • EPIA-M Eden 600MHz & Linux (Score:5, Informative)

    by luzrek ( 570886 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @02:12PM (#5622858) Journal
    I'm using an EPIA-M with a 600 Mhz Eden processor. It seems to be fast tenough encoding and decoding stuff. However, the EPIA-M doesn't seem to be that well supported on Linux. I suggest using the ALSA drivers instead of the Open Source Sound drivers or those that come with either Mandrake 9.1 or Redhat 8.0. The embeded video card works fine with the standard EPIA drivers, but the direct mpeg2 doesn't work. Overall I'm pretty happy with it, but there are problems.

  • These run too hot too? I would have thought that the best market for these would be small appliance-like devices that would run not-that-fast-but-fast-enough, generate very little heat, and use little power.

    Has everyone gone the other way? I'd love to build a little firewall/webserver out of something like this, (especially now that Sun drove cobalt into the ground and charges 2-3x what they charge for their V100s).

    Are there any options out there for these small/cool/lower-power computers? Where can I fin
  • "Haven't we met before?"

  • DVI (Score:3, Insightful)

    by spongman ( 182339 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @02:16PM (#5622879)
    This isn't just a comment on these boards reviewed here, but on small form factors and integrated graphics in general: why can't they make them with DVI video outputs? I mean, you're not going to be playing twitch games on these things so why not?
    • At this point, I would suspect it is mostly market forces. While revenue for LCD flat pannel displays in the next year will probably cross that of CRT monitors, that still means that CRT sales will be a significantly larger volume of sales.

      Additionally from what I have seen, most LCD flat pannel displays support vga/15-pin inputs as well as DVI, yet I don't know of a CRT that accepts the DVI input. As a result, an interest in selling _more_ of these units will be served by supporting the 15-pin analog inte

  • Upgrade? Who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by davidsheckler ( 45018 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @02:16PM (#5622880) Homepage
    When a motherboard with processor, video, nic, tv-out, usb and firewire that costs $150.00, you
    can just buy another in three years.

  • While the form factor on these boards are great, one gives up a lot in the way of ability to upgrade, since many parts are now soldered onto the motherboard.

    Uhh... no.... they are IN the motherboard, not just soldered to it.
  • While the form factor on these boards are great, one gives up a lot in the way of ability to upgrade, since many parts are now soldered onto the motherboard.

    Doesn't anyone else remember those horrible Packard Bell and Wang (haha) computers that soldered most of their parts to the motherboard? It was not something good, and we all hated it. I just hope it doesn't become a trend again, because I won't buy it (quite literally!).
    • One of the other problems that PB included was that these components could not be disabled. From what I have read and seen, the Bios on these boards should support peripheral replacement, so if you really want to replace the 16550afn uart driven /dev/ttyS0 interface with a pci card based 8250 uart driven /dev/ttyS0 port, You can.

      PB was also not the only company who put components on the MB. Compaq and IBM also have systems built with video, serial, printer, and drive management built into the motherboard.
    • Most any mother board you get now has 90% of its components 'on-board'.

      Ibm started the process with the PS/2.

      It has its upside and downside..
    • Doesn't anyone else remember those horrible Packard Bell and Wang (haha) computers that soldered most of their parts to the motherboard? It was not something good, and we all hated it.

      Here is what you CAN upgrade:

      Memory. There are one or two slots depending on model. Is 1GB enough?

      There is a PCI slot. Two if you buy a riser card.

      You have 4 IDE connectors for disks, CDrom, etc

      And finally you've got USB

      Considering this is not meant to be a replacement for a full-fledged workstation, I think the upg

    • The problem with those Packard Hell systems wasn't so much that everything was soldered on board, it was that everything that was soldered on board was complete and utter SHIT!

      When all the components that are integrated are of sufficient quality that you don't really worry about upgrading them for the specific tasks, it's not that much of a disadvantage, but with the Packard Hells, their on-board stuff was total crap (as was everything else with their systems). Now, that's not to say that everything in th
  • Nice small form factor, like Mini-ITX.
    1 AGP slot, 2 PCI slots
    Onboard LAN

    AthlonXP supporting chipset
    2GB max ram

    This way, I have onboard lan, can choose my own video card, choose my own sound card, and still have another slot left incase the onboard lan dies, or incase i need a modem for dialup.

    I haven't looked very hard, but most mini-itx boards i see have onboard video and sound, which pretty much sucks for anyone planning on doing anymore more than word processing.

  • Gaming on these things (Score:5, Insightful)

    by freeweed ( 309734 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @02:22PM (#5622906)
    Every time someone talks about mini-ITX lately, there's always the inevitable comment "don't plan on running Quake 3 on it" or some such nonsense.

    If I had the cash, I'd say one of these would make the *perfect* emulation console. You can get cases about the same size as the board, maybe 4-5 inches high (ie: smaller than an Xbox :). Toss in even a 10gb hard drive and you can have thousands upon thousands of games available. Coupla USB controllers, built in TV-out.. *drool* Hell, add on the always mentioned mp3 player, and it's multifunctional.

    Oh yeah, there's always that legality issue :(
  • When I first saw these things, I saw the small cases for them and they were pretty snazzy. There is a french company (can't recal the link) that makes nice shiny boxes for these things that are basically little cubes.

    I use laptops for all of my home sitdown machines, and then ssh into servers to do anything that needs more power than the laptop. I don't play games at all. I do financial analsys on the servers that are set up in a cluster (albeit a frequently down cluster these days).

    So I had no desire for

  • FIC CR51 Falcon (Score:4, Informative)

    by certron ( 57841 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @02:28PM (#5622926)
    There is a unit that I've been looking at made by FIC, which they have named CR51 "Falcon" which uses the 17cm x 17cm mini-itx board from Via and comes with a 933mhz processor. Newegg has it, for $150, which includes case, power supply, motherboard, cpu, and heatsink/fan. What interested me about this is that apparently by adding only RAM and an optical drive, there is a firmware included ("RaptureWare") that boots in 4-5 seconds to play mp3s, DVDs, VCDs and audio CDs. Add hard drive and you have a full computer.

    I didn't buy it, mostly because I would be buying it for someone else, but also I looked at the floating point performance and decided that it wasn't that great for a general-purpose desktop for them.

    http://www.ownt.com/technews/2003/fic_falcon/fic _f orm_factor.shtm has a review, but the site goes up and down. Use the google cache instead.

    [a good half hour of google searching later...]

    It's really hard to find reviews of this thing. Dammit.

    When their site comes back up, I'll post a thread from my LUG about the boards. The best idea that I have is to buy the FIC CR51 Falcon and put a wireless card in it and put MeshAP on it, or take a few of the mini-itx boards, hook them up to be powered from car batteries, add wireless and have a mobile wireless network. Would be kinda cool, no?

  • Just how useful they can be... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MoralHazard ( 447833 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @02:30PM (#5622934)
    For the record, you CAN get hardware acceleration under Linux with the built-in Trident chipset--it's not the normal trident.c driver in the kernel. Here's a link (no guarantees, it's Geocities):

    http://www.geocities.com/jagasian/

    I personally own five mini-itx systems, and I've purchased about another 20 for my firm. Up until this past month, we didn't have the space to install real rack servers, so I started buying Epia 800 boards and Cubid 2677R cases--they're tiny, low power, and not very noticable, and more than fast enough for a firewall, mail server, web server, what-have-you. And they look a lot sexier lying around the office.

    We also use them for forensic work. Put an IDE controller in the PCI slot, and you can pack the entire machine, plus an LCD monitor, keyboard, and mouse, into a breifcase-sized Pelican case. Pack a few extra PCI cards (SCSI, FW, MFM/RLL controller) and you can access just about any hard drive ever made. Many's the time we've made our reputation by being on the scene in hours, fully prepared and able to do a drive acquisition, for a job that the competition needed two days to prepare for. Clients eat that shit up.

    Basically, you haven't lived until you've had a really portable system with actual PCI slots. I have a laptop, but this is a whole 'nother ball game.
    • I personally own five mini-itx systems, and I've purchased about another 20 for my firm. Up until this past month, we didn't have the space to install real rack servers, so I started buying Epia 800 boards and Cubid 2677R cases--they're tiny, low power, and not very noticable, and more than fast enough for a firewall, mail server, web server, what-have-you. And they look a lot sexier lying around the office.

      A friend of mine is setting up a web hosting farm completely built around the EPIA platform. My pri

    • For the record, you CAN get hardware acceleration under Linux with the built-in Trident chipset--it's not the normal trident.c driver in the kernel.

      Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks like the driver for TV-Out. I believe most of the complaints about the lack of "hardware acceleration" for the EPIA-M are aimed toward the lack of support for the MPEG-2 decoder in the CLE266 chipset.

  • What do you WANT? (Score:3)

    by xA40D ( 180522 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @02:33PM (#5622947) Homepage
    The seems to be two types of "user" out there. Those who what massive amounts of upgradeability, and those who don't.

    I'm both.

    I have a massively over powered box with masses of disks, multiple network adaptors, CD/DVD drive, CD burner, masses of memory, top-notch graphics, etc., etc. It's the computer I MUST HAVE to do what I do. It is truly "the canine's gonads".

    It's also mostly an ornament. Owing to the excessive noise it generates, I only use it when I really need it. And I never need it as I've got boxes in my cellar that do everything I ever need - all running on yesterday's "must have" hardware.

    So I find that now what I really need is small, quiet, unobtrissive, reasonably performing box - with a big screen. Don't need it to be upgradeable - just need one in every room in the house.

    So, these mini-ITX boards look great. Small, quiet, and in all ways absolutely ideal.

    Alas. I've spent so much on my techological ornament uber-beastie.... d'oh

  • ...Unless you want to watch pirated DivX movies, "backup" MP3s, edit video, do any kind of serious audio mixing, any kind of print-quality work with Photoshop, or of course 3D gaming. So, like, if all you use your computer for is web surfing and email, why even bother with Linux and everything else?

    • No guesses. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by xA40D ( 180522 )
      if all you use your computer for

      When I was a kid my parents had a radio in every room of the house. I could never workout why. These things didn't even have stereo, or seperate speakers - just small cheap portable transistor radios (which were never "ported"). Whereas the sound system in my bedroom was a really "power-user" system. Worth more than all the other electrical equipment in the house combined. I always promised that when I could afford it I would build myself the ultimate sound system.

      But
  • Mini distro for turning a mini itx system into a media player box... 16mb rootfs file system bootable from compact flash and via pxe net booting :)
    http://www.freevix.org
    • 16mb rootfs file system bootable from compact flash and via pxe net booting :)

      Phoenix [phoenix.com] had a recent press release, debuting their new Me series of BIOS'en [phoenix.com], that let's the motherboard developers include embedded software like mp3 players and such without having to boot into an actual OS.

      If VIA could incorporate some of this tech into their EPIA products, we could have some truly cheap multimedia hardware that did everything developers could throw at it.

      We certainly live in exciting times for hardware.

  • Binary-only Linux "support" (Score:3, Informative)

    by friartux ( 89443 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @02:36PM (#5622968)
    I own a VIA EPIA-M9000, and I can't say that Linux is really supported worth beans.

    I tried installing Mandrake (sorry, I don't remember which pre-release, but it was recent); SuSE 8.1 from DVD; and Red Hat (Phoebe 8.0.93 prerelease). The only one that had any luck was Phoebe. Mandrake wouldn't install due to crashes; SuSE wouldn't install from DVD -- some form of IDE-DVD data corruption. Got it to install using CD's, but got some random crashes later.

    The M9000 uses the CLE266 chipset, which has a new video part. In all 3 distros, you're stuck with the VESA driver -- which meant no acceleration and a far-from-lovely 60Hz refresh rate.

    Why did I use cutting-edge distros? Because the board has very 'new' hardware -- firewire ports, USB2, CLE266, audio, etc. The IDE, audio, and various ports worked fine with Phoebe, right down to the Epson C82 inkjet I connected via USB. But the VESA video is just plain awful.

    VIA offers binary-only video drivers for older distributions, and has been promising (but not delivering) source for ages -- but only for 2D video functions. They've cited "legal issues" on any support for the hardware MPEG decoder and 3D.

    (Pay attention: useful links coming up :-)

    The drivers [viaarena.com] they've released thus far have been for older distributions [viaarena.com], mainstream only. Just try Gentoo or something. There are many frustrated users [viaarena.com] out there right now.

    For the curious, here's what I'm using: EPIA-M9000 ($150) in a $28 generic mini-ATX (not ITX) case w/250W power supply; 512MB PC2100 RAM; 120GB Maxtor hard drive; LG combo DVD-ROM/CD-R (16X DVD, 32x10x40x CDR); Intel eepro100 ethernet; external modem and other peripherals. Yes, it currently does firewalling amongst its other duties.

    Bottom line: consider this some bleeding-edge, undersupported hardware and proceed accordingly.

    • I'm setting up the 9000 with Gentoo. And it's slowly getting there. Use the 2.4.21pre6 or so kernel for the via sounds, the 2.4.20 doesn't work.

      Video I'm still working on, thinking of using the pci slot, but then I can have some OpenGL games too like tuxracer.

  • I value very quiet computers so I use a 533Mhz EPIA (passively cooled) as my main workstation.

    The case is a Chyang Fun cube, with the power supply replaced with a 60W DC->DC one. Instead of a hard drive I use a compact flash to boot an OpenBSD diskless kernel and then onwards everything is over the network to my disk server in the other room. Since the compact flash is only read for the kernel and never written to it shoulnd't die too quickly.

    Result? No moving parts and therefore dead silent. It

  • We've got one... (Score:3, Informative)

    by JKR ( 198165 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @03:14PM (#5623173)
    ...set up as a portable demo box for our software (which needs an FPGA PCI card, so laptops aren't possible). It's the cheapest Epia board (533 MHz C3 chip). To my suprise, it's been rock-solid stable and pretty functional (although we've only got Windows 2000 on it).

    However, the lack of L2 cache (and maybe not even any L1?) absolutely cripples performance on some things; a Logitech USB web cam struggles to get 3 FPS, because it needs the CPU to do decompression of the video stream. USB-1 isn't fast enough to stream 640x480 uncompressed video, and this board doesn't support USB-2 (the newest ones do, but they also NEED a CPU fan).

    I plan to play with emulation (I think it'd be amusing to turn one into a every-obsolete-computer-you-ever-owned box) but the lack of cache might kill that idea. It ought to be able to emulate a 2MHz 6502 though...

    Jon.

  • Mine's a 802.11b base station (Score:3, Informative)

    by d3xt3r ( 527989 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @03:19PM (#5623193)
    It's great. I bought one of these a few weeks ago to run FreeBSD on as a wireless basestation. Just bought a mini case for it, both from iDot [idot.com]. And a $40 wireless card (Prism 2.5) from New Egg [newegg.com].

    I installed FreeBSD 5.0 + IPFilter and I couldn't be happier. I use it to share my cable connection around the house. Best of all, it's right next to the TV and has S-Video out, so I'll be installing XWindows soon and using it to watch MPEG's, play MP3s, etc.

    The best part is the thing only uses 5-15 watts, so it's super cheap to run. It's also totally fanless. Great little piece of hardware.

  • While the form factor on these boards are great, one gives up a lot in the way of ability to upgrade, since many parts are now soldered onto the motherboard.

    From the Article...

    The Mini ITX standard is not diminutive by accident and miniaturization has been achieved primarily by doing away with various components. The first victim of the red pen was the CPU socket, which simply took up too much space. That is why the processor is always soldered directly onto VIA EPIA boards.

    Yep that will affect your a
    • "Yep that will affect your ability to upgrade"

      Very true, but almost every time I've done a CPU upgrade I've ended up buying a new motherboard anyway.

      --
      jc
      • True enough, but upgrading isn't the only problem. What if a single component breaks? Now you can't just swap it out. That said, I hardly worry about swapping the CPU out of my gamecube. If a component dies, I send it in for warranty work. I only see this as a disadvantage if you are running mission critical stuff on it (and if you're that stupid, you get what you deserve :).

  • My Mini-ITX is da bomb (Score:4, Informative)

    by jht ( 5006 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @04:15PM (#5623403) Homepage Journal
    In my house, we have "real" systems in just about every room (two Macs, a P4, a couple of Athlons, and assorted other stuff), but I use a Mini-ITX system as the server to run it all. I'm using the Eden-533 processor in a Cubid case, with an external DC power supply, no floppy, and a laptop hard drive. It runs fanless, and the only thing you ever hear from it is the occasional chirp out of the hard drive.

    I run e-Smith Linux on it, which is based loosely on Redhat, but tuned specifically to be a SOHO server. No video issues because it only uses text mode - I do all the admin either from the console or through the web interface. It makes a powerful little server.

    My old home server was a Flex ATX system that was almost as small (one of the old "Book PC's"), but it had the loud fan on the built-in PS, plus a CPU fan for the Celery 366 I ran in it. And from an airflow perspective, it was all cramped up inside. It was slower, hotter, and louder than the ITX, even though the form factor was almost identical.

    As I mentioned above, I have plenty of computers that are more powerful, but the speed is fine for most routine purposes. I'll always keep a high-octane PC around for gaming and such, and I still use Macs a decent amount, but I suspect I'll buy more Mini-ITX systems down the road for the computers that'll just handle the basics. They're smaller, use less juice, and you don't realize how great silent operation is until you have it.
  • The extremely low power consumption of the MiniITX boards makes them ideal for running my company's webserver. Compared to the Athlon servers they replaced, they consume a fraction of the power; they should run a lot longer off our large UPS next time there is a power outage.

    Performance problems? The low cost has made it easy to purchase more computers, each running specialized tasks. The most mission critical computers get the biggest UPS.
    • by specialized tasks I assume you mean that a few are image servers, a few are content servers - do you actually have databases running on these?

      How many hits do you handle with these?

      I agree that these things use much less power, and therefore also generate less heat and noise, so they would make fantastic cluster machines or servers... were they faster.
      From everything I have seen, they just aren't cost efficient when you crunch the numbers.

      Can you say some vague figures at how many hits they ha

  • I recently bought her a laptop. Mostly so she could surf/work while watching Oprah.

    This has been working well enough, but recently she asked how difficult it would be to combine things so she could watch TV and surf/work on the same screen.

    I went looking, and came across mini-itx boards.

    Then I found the Leadtek TV2000 (http://www.leadtek.com.tw/www/Web_Leadtek/multim e dia/TV2000_XP/TV2000-XP-deluxe.asp)

    You know, it's starting to look like I could have a little networked entertainment/work server wit

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