Well, mini-itx.com is UK based, hence the woeful shipping charges. My point still stands :( That explains the shipping cost then. Isn't mini-box.com.au a more sensible place to go to now, seeing as it's based in Australia and their prices aren't that bad? See my post in this thread on them.... my e...

Shamgar wrote: Good to hear you got your money back in any case. Oh well, judging from your experiences (and others) I guess these mini PC dealers in Oz aren't that great when it comes to order time.

Well, mini-itx.com is UK based, hence the woeful shipping charges. My point still stands

In addition to the above, I tried ordering from www.mini-itx.com for the same Via Dual Riser Part as I was talking about before. Despite paying an enormous amount for shipping ($50!! - yes, I really needed that part), I didn't receive a tracking number or, for that matter, an item. Although they pol...

I am writing to avoid the following: http://www.mini-box.com.au I ordered a Via Dual Riser card for my mini-ITX. There was a "delivery that went missing", and then after 8 weeks of pestering, they finally gave a refund after saying they'd get stock in 2 weeks. Not impressed. Avoid. At least they gav...

I just noticed this thread... It's probably too late to change motherboards, but I'm really excited about the Biostar A760G in terms of low power consumption. However, I am optimizing around the idle case, which is a little different than your application. Correct, I've already got the motherboard....

The atom has so far come with ancient & very inefficient chipsets (apart from the NVidia). The processor consumes very little power. Presumably Pineview will bring much lower power Atom boards. Given my very heavy use of I/O, it provides an interesting result for anyone wanting to to use an Atom (w...

I have more data for you. In this test, I tried to as closely as I can (including desktop configuration and even the 2GiB RAM stick!) replicate the 5050e system vs the atom system which wasn't quite powerful enough. Under the same load as the atom could achieve, with the same hard disks (2x 500G Sam...

If you want the lowest power consumption the 780G chip is not the one. 5050e is good, tho, and AMD in general. 740G chip is better -- assuming you don't need the better 3D video of 780G. Like this -- Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2 -- but I guess I'm looking more at idle power... at full CPU load, difference...

I have a AMD 4050e Linux system and is very easy to cool (so probably uses very little power). AMD Cool n Quiet runs by default on my Fedora 9 install. Not sure if 4050e is still made, but there is also the 4450e and 4850e, but don't know if they actually use less power than the 5050e. I can only (...

Designing yer own car PC? :mrgreen: Close, a data collection system for a research project. Vehicle-based, yes, but certainly not entertainment! why does Atom suck? Not low enough power consumption or not enough performance? It doesn't. I'm actually quite impressed by the chip overall. The Dual Cor...

Hello, I am looking for a low power CPU + Mobo Combo. Specially, I am after **low power**, rather than **now noise**. It's actually for a test bed for a semi-portable embedded system and as far as I'm concerned, it could sound like a Jet Engine, but it will be running off (large) batteries and a DC-...

I wound up using an Thermalright SI-128, which does the job beautifully on my AMD X2 3800+, but does not leave enough room to fit the HDDs in the left-hand bay at the front. They do fit, but you'll need infinitely small fingers to get the sata connectors in. I have therefore ordered it's little brot...

Hello, I thought I might post this in the hope that someone may find this useful. The passive Gigabyte 8600GT card DOES fit in a Silverstone LC16M, albeit with very little room. You will need to make sure that you have short DVD drive too, or this option will vanish. Check also the location of the P...

A little OT, but it might help someone one day

I have a Scythe Ninja on my Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 motherboard, and the heatpipe interferes with one of the RAM slots.

Which is fine, if you handle that you'll effectively only get one paired set of RAM on the board.

I'm using a Thermalright SI-128 with a nexus 120mm fan, with a fanmate controller and is practically silent. The process is an athlon X2 3800+ (65W), and it never seems gets above 40-45deg in a Brisbane Autumn, which can get to around 30deg indoors during the day. My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-M57...

Similar situation here is Australia - $50 for most of the standard brands, $220 for the Plextor. SO what's the best of the rest? The shorter the better too - I don't have a lot of room in the case. As a bit of a side issue, I use MythTV, so is there a liux utility for tweaking things like max drive ...

Cool! Let us know how you go. I am waiting patiently for my heatsink and fans to arrive for my new system. With any sort of luck, I will be getting my hands dirty tomorrow... but the yum update will take overnight

Second, regarding the CPU. This is probably a stupid question, but I've just got all these numbers jumbled up inside my head. What is the difference between the Athlon X2 with Brisbane core and the 65 watt Energy Efficient Athlon X2s? Which runs cooler? Keeping in mind that, as far as I can tell, t...

I just found this out the hard way.

The Scythe Ninja does NOT fit in a Silverstone LC16M. You have been warned!

Consider also a Via MiniITX board - it can alledgely decode HDTV with the help on an on-board MPEG decoder.

Or, **gasp** a Mac Mini!! Seriously, it might well just get the job done. Check out the MythTV mailing lists for the discussion.

Agreed. Before it smoked, I have a P4-2.4GHz with an NV6200 card that was decoding 1080i with 60% CPU usage. XMVC was choppy - for some reason it wanted to drop every 2nd frame. Other users reported it working fine for Kaffeine, but not MythTV for some reason. It smoked because I opened the case and...

In general, the more power, the more heat it generates. Sometimes, however, a more modern graphics card will produce less heat because it is produced on a semiconductor process with smaller transistors. Smaller transistors in general means less leakage when they switch, directly reducing the power c...

Hello all, I am looking at a media centre/file server and this case seems to fit the bill, as far as looks, cooling and space is concerned. However, I would just like to know if anyone has suspended HDDs in this case -I am a bit of a convert to HDD suspension after the results in my Antec Solo in my...

What CPU do you have? Anything modern (P4-2.8GHz or later, say) will be able to replay HDTV without the need for hardware decoding on the graphics card. If so, then something basic like a NVIDIA 7100 card will do fine - and many have the small form factor too. If not, then prepare yourself for some ...

It gets better: I tried another case (well, I reached the cable across) and the same issue - does not sense the headphones plugged in. I have tried playing with the utility provided by Gigabyte (realtek) and you have to DISAB:E sensing just to get sound out of the headphone. Plugging and unplugging ...

**Note to moderators** If this is in the wrong forum, feel free to move it. Hello, I know this isn't a troubleshooting forum per se, but this is probably the single largest community that uses the Antec Solo, and I bought one on the basis of this advice :) My question is a simple one: Does the Antec...

floffe wrote:Well, the sane swap handling in linux should enable you to spin down the HDD more often than windows, if you're gonna be really greedy about power

Curious... Does spinning down hard drives have reliability implications?

The idle vs full power thing is interesting. Can we start a campaign for measuring load of various systems doing different tasks - for example, idle, word processing, DVD watching, HDTV decoding...? Unfortunantly, there seems to be no good repository for this, and it might help in understanding the ...

At the risk of being in the wrong thread, has anyone spotted the fabled 35W AMD X2 3600+ processors?

I know it is possible to underclock/volt the EE versions, but it seems like the 35W versions just do not exist...