On Sat, 18 Oct 2003, Stroller wrote: > > I stumbled across this today: http://www.mini-box.com/m100.htm > > Also check out http://www.mini-itx.com/ - they have some very cute > looking cases, such as these: http://tinyurl.com/rejp > My mother has a 1ghz from them.
For those of us in North America, you can also go to http://www.idot.com, who sell mini-itx and other small machines. It doesn't look like they have as complete a selection as mini-itx.com, but they can probably get stuff. Although looking at their case descriptions, it becomes obvious that the faster boards need bigger cases (for cooling, I'd say). > I think most of these Mini-ITX cases are a "win-chip" (IE: low-end > x86-compatible) processor & also a low-end on-board graphics card. I'd > have anticipated 1ghz to be adequate, but I seem to have been wrong in > my ball-park estimations of processor performance recently! All mini-itx boards use a Via C3 (or equivalent). It's regarded as slower and less powerful, but doesn't require much power or produce much heat. For intensive graphics, such as gaming or playing mpegs, it may not be adequate, but it's certainly sufficient for web browsing and email, and probably also a low-end web server or firewall/router. (I intend to build a router out of one of the CL6000 boards someday.) I would guess its biggest weakness to be floating point operations, and you can even get audio players which don't use floating point. Mini-itx boards also, to accomplish their small size, have everything directly on the motherboard. CPU is directly soldered on. You get one PCI slot, but no guarentee the case will provide for a riser card. Despite the drawbacks, I think it's useful for a lot of things, excluding gaming and other cpu/video-intensive stuff. Still, I think that as computers become faster and faster (and hotter and louder), the trend will be towards small, quiet, and cool-running, with speed becoming less important. -- Marshal Newrock, unemployed Linux user in Lansing, MI Caution: Product will be hot after heating -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
