Mini ITX motherboard/CPU

[Mr-Megalo]

Do any of you guys have any experience with mini ITX setups ?

I'm allready planning my next project but I wondered how something like the Epia M 10000 with Nehemiah 1 Ghz CPU and a Gig of Ram would run something like Kawaks and maybe a DivX film or 2.

Also - have any of you chaps ever used alternative storage to a conventional hard drive, something like a 1gb mem card

I am planning something with a minimal install of Win98 SE and a couple of apps, if I can use a 1gb mem card I can call my little box of tricks "3G"
a G representing each 1 Gig device I am using  :blink: and not need a hdd

[NFG]

In my experience the video chip is more important than the CPU.  A crappy video chip, like you might find on a tiny mobo, might lack features for scaling or speedy movement.  I had trouble with my first-gen Shuttle mobo, it didn't scale at all so games were super-tiny on the screen.

[Mr-Megalo]

the mobo I was looking at - I can assign it upto 64mb of Ram for the video - I was thinking that should be enough to run MvC and SFA3 and maybe watch a film every now and then.

Does anyone have any recomendations on which miniITX boards are pretty good and which perform . . not so good

[Aidan]

Flash memory supports a limited number of writes. After about 10,000 writes, you may find that it no longer allows you to write any longer. I have sucessfully killed a CF card by allowing a swap file to exist on it. Six months later, the CF card was acting like it had bad sectors. If you can ensure that you do a minimal number of writes, then you'd probably be ok. That typically means using a RAMdisk.

In Windows, the things that are heavy writers are the registry and the swap file.

[Mr-Megalo]

thanks for the heads up on that !

decided to go with a laptop hard drive and a Morex 55w PSU, I'm also gonna go for 512mb DDr 3200 instead, the whole caboodle should cost me around �250 inc delivery and then the box its going in.

[atom]

Since none of the mini-itx boards I have seen sport an agp slot I will not be purchasing one. Onboard video be it 512mb is worthless. Most games will have to go into software mode since most onboard video doesnt have much support for Direct3D or OpenGL.  Your best bet with an ITX board would be to get the best PCI card you can find, which i believe is like a GeForce 5700. But if you are like me you hate having a graphics card and still having that VGA port on there for the onboard video. Then the onboard video is likely still going to eat 32mb of your ram. Bleh!

This is from a gaming perspective on a gaming forum. If you want to set it up as a media center, playing divx, mp3, dvds whatever on your tv
stereo setup, then this is great!  

[Mr-Megalo]

mini-itx with AGP slot

http://forums.sudhian.com/messageview.aspx...4&enterthread=y

[Mr-Megalo]

yea I've spoken to someone via another forum, he says for the games I'd be wanting to play (SFA3 and MvC mainly with Nebula) I would have problems, he had a slightly high spec than the machine I'm planning and says video output was at time choppy.

I'm looking into a PCI card and a riser card so I can mount the PCI VGA card sideways, although I am still a little put off by that too, maybe I should wait a few months for the mini-ITX with AGP slots to be more readly available.