usbcd36- your avatar is AWESOME!- but only because the wings look like bunny ears -_-
I thought about buying the MacMini once, because it is so slick and little. Then I bought a Dell laptop instead ~_~ My own PCp will be smaller by far than a MacMini (even excluding the Mini's slim optical drive), use little battery power, and run a larger variety of applications. Furthermore, I will have the far greater pride of actually building it all from scratch, instead of just hacking a prebuilt PC.
I still plan on buying a Mini though, cause they're cute ^_^
With Nano-itx on there way out to the general public why not hold off til they get here. They're like half (maybe more) the size of the standard Mini-itx mobos. And the ones with Luke technolgy will be able to do some wild stuff with graphix, I think atleast.
vskid wrote:Nerd = likes school, does all their homework, dies if they don't get 100% on every assignment
Geek = likes technology, dies if the power goes out and his UPS dies too
There seems to be many misconceptions about VIA computer products atm.
PROS:
The prevelant pro to using VIA technology is the very low power drain. Now they have 800MHz chips running fanless, which is rather nice, and even 1GHz chips from them can be fitted with a large fanless sink (bought seperately). For those reasons alone, VIA products are a superior choice for PCp's with long battery life.
CONS:
All current VIA cpu's have a rather anemic floating-point-unit, a processor component vital to 3D graphic rendering and physics engines. The current 1GHz chips from VIA have a FPU with about half the capability of a Pentium III.
The 533MHz Eden chip from VIA runs more like a 200-300MHz Pentium 2. The 800MHz VIA C3 does NOT make a Celeron look performance-lacking. In fact, the 800MHz VIA C3 would compare to the performance of a 600MHz Celeron. The PIII type Celeron features a similarly powerful FPU to the PIII itself, and is therefor much more adept at 3D graphics operations.
The VIA integrated graphics solutions to date have been less potent than the aging Intel Extreme 1 chipset. I have yet to look up the specs of the new TwisterT S3 integrated video chip, but it shows as having an AGP8x bus and up to 64MB shared video. All of those MB's will not help much if the chip itself is weak.
EDIT:
I believe I'm going to go for a Commell 3.5" x 5.7" motherboard with a VIA cpu, because I would rather have super-long battery life.
EDIT AGAIN:
The TwisterT chip incorporates an S3 Savage4 graphics chipset. The chip is capable of processing about 100million texels/s. In comparison, Intel Extreme 1 does about 400million/s, and GeForce FX5200 does about 1000million texels/second.
So the current VIA solution is about 1/10 as capable of the low-end FX5200 card. Prospects for 3D gaming look extremely poor.
If anyone is building a PCp that is more along the line of a desktop (no batteries, like Ben's), then you might want to check out a Macintosh LC I/II/III power supply. It's roughly 1.5 x 1.5 x 8.0 inches and has the same leads as a PC power supply, just in different order. If anyone needs one, I have a couple lying around, or alternatively, eBay for a Mac LC III; it's flat and broad, with one floppy on the front and cheap as heck - they were crappy computers, even by Apple's standards.
Well, yeah. LC=Low-cost Color. If you wanted a decent machine for the time, you'd buy a Mac IIci.
(Factoid- The original LC and the Mac II were the only Macs to use the 68020 processor)
Yeah, LC power supplies are really small. I'm not too sure what kind of load they can handle, but for a PCp with just a slot-load lappy CD drive it shouldn't be a problem.
Once I get the funds, and once I finish my portable (if ever), I'm going to convert an old Apple SCSI HD 20 into a 200gb external FireWire or USB 2.0 hard drive.
dam right. but a nice pcp sould happen soon, well with all the nano being released and all. I think if i had like 5hundread and a 6" touch redly avalible i would do it in a hart beat.
