[Martinus]

[color=66ff00]Found this a few days ago 'Mini ITX', looks interesting as an all around 'non game' PC starting point. I'm not too familiar with the stats of the C3 processors in comparison to AMD or Intel's similarly clocked models. The 1GHz board looks like it would have a good deal of potential considering I'm now running a 300K6-2.

Anyone have any experience with these boards or any views of their potential?
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[Zeronet]

It has good smuggling potential and is probably the fastest board in the galaxy. *runs*

[Martinus]

[color=66ff00]Arf.
Actually that's one of the reasons it interests me, it's so fantastically small and hooks up to a TV so it's nice and mobile.
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[Stryke 9]

Er, what, single-board computers? Got a uniboard (or whatever the hell they call them) somewhere in my back room. Think it's gathering dust, mostly.

[Martinus]

[color=66ff00]You don't think it's featureset future proofs it for the next 2 to 3 years? Filesharing and video decoding seem to be its forté.
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[Stryke 9]

I think I want something I can fit four or five CPUs and half a dozen memory cards on, overclock, and give a freon cooler from the back of a mini-icebox. No customization here.

Also, I can't be bothered to set it up.

[vyper]

The big advantage PCs have is thier customisation and in essence, modularity. You can pull, add, modify almost any component.

However, this thing might encourage more people to build thier own machine as it would be quite simple to set up. (Relatively, anyway).

I think it'll have a cult following, but nothing widespread.

[Stryke 9]

They're like those nice little Mini-Coopers and ****. They're kinda cute, they probably do nicely, but then there are those of us who want something where we can jack up the axles, put on caterpillar treads, hang sheet-metal over the chassis, watertight the engine on, and give a nitrous system.

[Admiral LSD]

Originally posted by vyper
The big advantage PCs have is thier customisation and in essence, modularity. You can pull, add, modify almost any component.

However, this thing might encourage more people to build thier own machine as it would be quite simple to set up. (Relatively, anyway).

I think it'll have a cult following, but nothing widespread.

...and the Via EPIA motherboards are designed to be as far away from that as possible.

They aren't really meant as general PC replacements, I would have thought the fact they all use Via/Cyrix C3 CPUs would have given that away. Instead, they're designed for applications where high performance and flexibility aren't really required but a self contained PC with low power and cooling requirements is. Think self-contained multimedia players, TiVo, diskless workstations and emulation machines. Using regular PC hardware, even "low end" stuff,  in these kinds of situations would be well and trully overkill.