New toy

[mdlbear]

So, I finally broke down and got a Mini-ITX motherboard. Fry's had the VIA EPIA 800MHz on sale for $99.

When I opened the box on Thursday I found that some evil person had stolen the board and substituted a dead CD-ROM drive! Fortunately, Fry's has an excellent return policy, so this morning I went back and got a real one. They're also having a sale on RAM this weekend: 256MB of PC-133 for $20. I got two.

For those unfamiliar with the Mini-ITX form factor, it's a fully-equipped PC motherboard (admittedly with only one serial port and one PCI slot) that's under 7 inches square. This one has a low-power CPU with a nice, quiet little fan; there's also a fanless version but it's slower and more expensive. It also uses more expensive RAM.

The plan, quite apart from simply having fun seeing what kind of weird case I can make for it, is to use it for sound recording: it's quiet enough that I can have it in the same room with me, my guitar, and a couple of microphones. That's the plan, anyway.

Comments

[johno.livejournal.com]

I've been debating building something like this for recording directly to digital at Filks.

I figure $2-300 bucks for the system alone.

About right

[mdlbear]

So far, it's $100 for the board, $20 for the RAM, and $25 for the power supply (one of the small, quiet eMachines supplies). The mini-ITX cases I've seen are around $100, so add $75 if you don't plan on building or scrounging your own. Not using closeouts could easily bring you to $300.

Then you add peripherals. That's assuming, of course, that you don't have a pile of hard drives and CD-ROM drives lying around (as most of us do by now). Of course, you could drive the price back down by starting with one of the $200-$300 Linux boxes, or skip the disk and boot from ethernet, with a fileserver in the next room, which is definitely one of the configurations I have in mind.

Finally, add the high-quality audio subsystem; $200-$500. I have an M-Audio Omni Studio that I picked up on sale at Guitar Center a couple of years ago. Without that I'd strongly consider USB.

[johno.livejournal.com]

Have you seen this?

http://www.itxpc.com/toaster.htm

[mdlbear]

I see no image there, but there's something like it on the projects page at mini-itx.com

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

Damn good idea... and with just a bit of work with a heat pipe, you could probably eliminate the fan (or at least swap it for a great big slow-moving one, which would be a lot quieter.)

[mdlbear]

The CPU looks as though it has the same footprint as some video-card chips, for which a heat pipe is available. So that's something I'm definitely going to try.

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

Let me know how that works; I foresee something like this in my future (after the money situation improves, that is.)