Tom's Hardware Reviews VIA Mini-ITX Board 188
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.
state of linux support on mini-itx m series (Score:5, Informative)
in short
X yes but not with hardware acceleration
doesn't sound very apetizing (Score:2)
Ethernet driver (Score:2, Informative)
any serious network load on an EPIA system, you want Linux
2.4.21pre6 or later. via-rhine 1.17 dies under load.
Re:state of linux support on mini-itx m series (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:state of linux support on mini-itx m series (Score:3, Informative)
VIA needs to contribute to GCC -BADLY- (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:state of linux support on mini-itx m series (Score:2, Informative)
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)
Rus
Re:Small form factor users (Score:2)
Re:Small form factor users (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Small form factor users (Score:2)
rus
so thats what it looks like on the other side.. (Score:1, Funny)
me too (Score:2)
Re:me too (Score:2)
If you are using this in an office setting... (Score:2)
Re:If you are using this in an office setting... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:If you are using this in an office setting... (Score:2)
Hello...?! McFly...?
Incredibly cheap! (Score:5, Interesting)
Maan
Re:Incredibly cheap! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Incredibly cheap! (Score:2)
Re:Incredibly cheap! (Score:2)
Re:Incredibly cheap! (Score:2)
This is great with an external powersupply!
Re:Incredibly cheap! ($49 is the real price) (Score:4, Informative)
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
Re:Incredibly cheap! ($49 is the real price) (Score:2)
Re:Incredibly cheap! ($49 is the real price) (Score:2)
PC-Chips M787CL+ $49 [knowledgemicro.com]
The 667mhz is incorrect, it's 733mhz
You can find the Zalman northbridge heatsink at NewEgg for $6 (but shipping sucks).
The regular VIA C3 heatsinks won't work since there is no Socket to hook onto.
Zalman Chipset Heatsink (includes pushpin mount) [newegg.com]
Re:Incredibly cheap! ($49 is the real price) (Score:2)
Re:Incredibly cheap! ($49 is the real price) (Score:2)
Anyway, here is virtually the same board from ECS (or as we call it, Extra Cheap Shit), for $59.
ECS P6VEM3 [accupc.com]
Re:Incredibly cheap! (Score:2)
Maan
Re:Incredibly cheap! (Score:2, Informative)
Also these CPU's have almost nothing to do with the Cyrix chips of old.. the name is just about the only part of Cyrix still being used.
I'd still say not to get this if raw speed is what you want but if you just want something competitive t
Why not just get a laptop (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why not just get a laptop (Score:5, Interesting)
Crap (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Crap (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Crap (Score:2)
Re:Crap (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not Crap (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re:Not Crap (Score:2)
Good to know that even the 533 does a decent job with soft codecs, th
Re:Not Crap (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re:Crap (Score:2)
Good firewall (Score:4, Informative)
There is a more cost effective alternative... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:There is a more cost effective alternative... (Score:2)
Puto
Re:There is a more cost effective alternative... (Score:2, Insightful)
Here's some info I found:
A page at ECS describing the specs [ecs.com.tw]
A place selling them for $279 [yahoo.com]
If anyone can find a place that's confirmed selling them at $199, I'd be very interested.
Re:There is a more cost effective alternative... (Score:2)
However, I want them for a piece of software that connects to a midi port game port, that teaches you the piano/keyboard/ cause it connects throught the midi port. And it doesnt have one.
DAMMIT.
Puto
Re:There is a more cost effective alternative... (Score:2)
This may interest you: there are a number of USB to MIDI interfaces available here [kraftmusic.com] for PC systems...
Re:There is a more cost effective alternative... (Score:2)
You are indeed correct, the system is the ECS U-Buddie IN22 (or as they sometimes call it, the Em-22, it seems to depend on who you talk to at ECS about the product).
The company that one of my customers has purchased the systems from directly is a wholesale distributor. Sadly, they do not sell computer systems or equipment to end users. This company sells to Canadian business entities with a Canadian Provincial Sales Tax Permit. However, you should be able to find local distributors for this product.
It is coming (Score:4, Insightful)
why I'd like one of these in my car (Score:4, Insightful)
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
timothy
Re:why I'd like one of these in my car (Score:2)
Re:why I'd like one of these in my car (Score:2)
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).
Re:why I'd like one of these in my car (Score:2)
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.
A little OT- power sources (Score:2)
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
Re:A little OT- power sources (Score:2)
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
Re:why I'd like one of these in my car (Score:2)
Re:why I'd like one of these in my car (Score:2)
-Rusty
They also make great mp3 playing computers in cars (Score:4, Interesting)
What about PC/104? (Score:2)
Re:What about PC/104? (Score:3, Informative)
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)
Re:EPIA-M Eden 600MHz & Linux (Score:2)
Sound. The drivers which ship with Mandrake 9.1 and Redhat 8.0 don't seem to work correctly. I fixed this problem using the ALSA drivers. I'm not sure which options I set to use the 6-speaker output, but I turned it on at least once, then turned it off for the above reason.
Gyration po
Too Hot? (Score:2)
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
In the words of Ian MacKaye (Score:2)
DVI (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:DVI (Score:2)
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)
can just buy another in three years.
wha? (Score:2)
Uhh... no.... they are IN the motherboard, not just soldered to it.
Isn't that what Packard Bell did? (Score:2, Insightful)
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!).
Re:Isn't that what Packard Bell did? (Score:2)
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.
'Planar' *is* standard practice .. look around.. (Score:2)
Ibm started the process with the PS/2.
It has its upside and downside..
Re:Isn't that what Packard Bell did? (Score:2)
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
Re:Isn't that what Packard Bell did? (Score:2)
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
my dream mainboard (Score:2)
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.
Re:my dream mainboard (Score:2)
Gaming on these things (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Oh yeah, there's always that legality issue
depends on what you want to do with it (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re:depends on what you want to do with it (Score:2)
Was it the french company that does OpenBrick [openbrick.org]? They look nice, but they do not use Mini-ITX.
FIC CR51 Falcon (Score:4, Informative)
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/fi
[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)
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.
Re:Just how useful they can be... (Score:3, Informative)
A friend of mine is setting up a web hosting farm completely built around the EPIA platform. My pri
Re:Just how useful they can be... (Score:2, Informative)
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)
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
Uh, yeah, I guess they're great (Score:2)
No guesses. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 mini board (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.freevix.org
Re:mini distro for mini board (Score:2)
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)
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.
Re:Binary-only Linux "support" (Score:2)
Video I'm still working on, thinking of using the pci slot, but then I can have some OpenGL games too like tuxracer.
They are very nice... (Score:2, Interesting)
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)
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.
Re:We've got one... (Score:2)
Jon.
Mine's a 802.11b base station (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Upgrade restrictions. (Score:2)
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
Re:Upgrade restrictions. (Score:2, Insightful)
Very true, but almost every time I've done a CPU upgrade I've ended up buying a new motherboard anyway.
--
jc
Re:Upgrade restrictions. (Score:2)
My Mini-ITX is da bomb (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Low Power Consumption == High Uptime (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Low Power Consumption == High Uptime (Score:2, Interesting)
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 get my best ideas from my girlfriend (Score:2)
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
Re:Soldered parts (Score:2)
--jeff++
Re:How about mobile PIII and P4 (Score:2)
What I want is a Mini-ITX form factor board using an Intel chipset and a Pentium M processor. Much better performance than the VIA chips but still with the low power consumption (a 900MHz or 1GHz Pentium M should be able to work with only passive cooling).
Now, obviously such a product isn't going to come from VIA, and it will undoubtably cost more than the current offerings, but it would make for quite a nice little box (