What can you do with Mini-ITX boards
 

I have just got into mini-ITX boards and I was wondering if they are anygood in playing action games such as Quake 3, etc, I know that it is very slow and stuff..but I thought there might be a very good mini-ITX that I can do all the gaming on....
Well??
Chris

Well, what did you have in mind? There are pretty good performers out there that use the mini-ITX form factor - Via and nvidia-based AMD/AMD64-based motherboards, Intel 875-based ones, etc.

Håkan

well I was hoping that there is a AMD 64 mini-ITX board, but I can't seem to be able to find one.

Sorry, I was confusing them with micro-ATX (again!). :o
Head on over to mini-itx.com for a good source of information.


Håkan

the site provides alot of information concering hardware, however there are very little sources on usage.

What's good about those "mini-itx" motherboards other than the fact that they are small? If you simply want a small form-factor motherboard/case, why not try one of the Shuttle XPC boxes? They do have a couple of AMD Athlon 64 versions.

yeah well....I was just wondering if the mini-itx were powerful enough to play games and stuff

It depends on the board, chipset, other bits of the machine and more importantly the game.

Having a seperate graphics card will help, but ive never seen an itx board with an agp slot and im not sure what the performance would be of a PCI card compared to the onboard gpu which usually claim to be agp 2d/3d.

Loadsa memory would also help, you should generally buy the largest compatible sticks you can find.

Now that via are pushing their boards over 1ghz (sure i saw an ad for a dual cpu mini-itx board also) i guess playing Quake 3 wont be so hard, though why bother when theres nethack :o)


daihard: some of them are fanless which makes them rather quiet, which is nice. everything is generally onboard, although most boards are like that now. I have a little itx system acting as a small lan server running linux. Its seriously tiny, with a little tiny power supply to power it and a little tiny cardboard case i made. I guess im just cheap.

According to the current issue (February 2006) of Linux Journal Via will release dual 1GHz mini-ITX boards. These do not need fans to cool the CPU's. That's quite a lot of computing power for a fanless computer and I think it can replace a lot of big servers.

Edit: Link to the actual dual CPU motherboard: http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/ma...10dp/index.jsp


Håkan

do you think it is 2 500mhz or 2 1ghz chips

The 310DP comes with two 1GHz chips.


Håkan