mini-ITX boards

[Robert Edwards]

Apologies to those who hoped to see the two mini-ITX boards/systems at CLUG 
last night - they only arrived here around mid-day today.

First impressions: much smaller than an XBox, solid metal case (XBox has a 
plastic case with a thin metal liner), MoBo is slightly bigger than I 
expected.

Runs off of a 12VDC power supply (external) at 4.5A (presumably including 
hard drive, CD/DVD ROM etc.). So you could run it off your cigarette lighter.

Includes PXE in the BIOS, so possibility is there to boot from the network 
(as soon as I figure out how to make a PXE server work - previous experiments 
have been disastrous).

Includes room for a hard disk and a slim-CD/DVD ROM drive.

Can use either 100 or 133 MHz RAM (room for two DIMMs).

PCI riser included for only one PCI card (apparently MoBo will support 2 PCI 
cards on appropriate riser).

Main memory shared with video (hence CPU will be a little slower).

All main chips by VIA (CPU, North bridge and South bridge, including sound, 
network, video etc.).

Includes PAL/NTSC output (selectable in the BIOS) as well as VGA.

Overall - a lot more possibilities than XBox (PCI slot, variable RAM up to 
512MB, parallel, serial and PS/2 ports, two IDE interfaces, floppy interface 
etc.) but overall going to be more expensive (~A$300, plus memory, hard 
drive, DVD ROM), but don't need to "hack" anything.

Cheers,

Bob Edwards.