Via EPIA Mini-ITX motherboard

[Ed Hall]

I have an EPIA M6000 that I use for my main workstation.  I think I'm using
the same case as Matt (Casetronic Mini-ITX-2699R) but I've put a hard drive
(Seagate Barracuda IV, among the quietest of drives) and a slim CDROM drive
in it.  I've never seen a HDD or network problem after four months of
near-continuous use.  There's no way I could disable the fans given both
the fanless CPU and the disk, but I put a 47-ohm 1W  resistor in series
with the fans to quiet them down.  It's not silent, but it has a quiet
purr that just blends into any ambient sounds.  (It's quieter than my
wife's IMac, for instance.)

The onboard sound works, but there are occasional brief dropouts (system
load makes them a bit more frequent) which depending upon source material
are inaudible or are heard as soft clicks.  Every VIA sound chip I've
used with FreeBSD does this.  Since sound is very important to me, I
put a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz in the single PCI slot.  The case uses
an L-riser for PCI cards, and space is tight in all dimensions; I had
to nibble a notch to get the full-width Santa Cruz to fit.  But the
card works great.

I've not tried USB, but Firewire works fine; I use an external DVD-RW
for backups.  Just as long as I remember to have the external drive
power on before I connect until after I disconnect, and do a manual
Firewire bus reset after connecting (or make sure that there is valid
media in the drive first), things work flawlessly.

Like Matt says, you'd only get such a system if power, noise, or size
is a strong factor.  Power here in PG&E-land is a significant cost --
I figure that my ~40W system will pay for itself in a couple of years
compared to the average 200W drawn by most 2GHz+ boxes out there.
But it's only a bit faster than my old 333MHz P-II -- fast enough for
surfing, modest development, and as a front-end to other networked
systems.

		-Ed