Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

4 Comments

1. Joshua Jackson says:
   July 24th, 2006 at 3:08 am

   Actually, to my surprise. I did not know that it would fit in a standard atx machines motherboard pins. THat gives me a lot more in the way of choice. As you said as well, using a full mid tower case is not something that I particularly want to use though. I like the small case and am possibly thinking about a couple of possibilities. Thank you for mentioning that there are those options though.

2. Branko says:
   July 24th, 2006 at 7:43 pm

   Been there, done that. It’s nice to have a cheap case, but what is the point of mini-itx then ?

   Doing that you combine bad features of bodth worlds. That will get you relatively expensive, not so small and SLOW box.

   If you really don’t need mini-itx dimensions, some old Athlon might be a MUCH better choice. It runs circles around EPIA speedwise even if you clock it down, power consumption is not that much higher, you can expand it more easily since you have more PCI and AGP slots and you can mix and match open-source supporting hardware…

3. Stuart Herbert says:
   July 26th, 2006 at 7:02 pm

   The CM Stacker is hardly a cheap case

   The reasons I use mini-itx boards are power consumption and noise. Athlons use too much power, and you either have to lagg the case and/or switch to liquid cooling to deal with the noise from cooling them. Plus I’ve had many problems over the years with Athlon chips dying. (Fortunately, I’ve had much more luck with AMD64 chips). Many of the mini-itx boards can be passively cooled, and the ones that require active cooling don’t need noisy fan RPMs. There’s a lot to be said for passive cooling; you can put these boxes into really grungy locations (like workshops and garages), and because they don’t have fans sucking in crap from the air, they’re a lot more reliable than more mainstream PC parts.

   Compiling Gentoo on a 13000SP board isn’t fun, but once things are built, everything runs well enough. If all you’re doing is running a firewall or a fileserver, you really don’t need anything more powerful.

   I agree that the limited expansion of the mini-itx boards requires careful thought, but now that they come with two LAN sockets on the motherboard, things are a lot easier.

   The lovely thing about x86 hardware is that there’s so much to choose from to suit everyone’s personal tastes. And … you don’t have to stick with just x86 hardware these days.

4. mattm says:
   August 12th, 2006 at 9:29 am

   I’m having trouble getting a VIA SP8000E to boot from a SATA hd. Tried 2.6.16.27 and 2.6.17.6. You wouldn’t be able to post your kernel .config by any chance?

   Thanks