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mdlbearSo, 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.
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.
