My Pentium M Mini-ITX system

[xonik]

After about 10 months of ownership, I've finally gotten around to photographing and hosting some pictures of my Pentium M based SFF computer.

Here are the essential specs:

Intel Pentium M 735 1.7 GHz @ 2.2 GHz (Dothan core, 90 nm process, with 2 MB L2 cache and nominal system bus frequency of 400 MHz)
Commell LV-671NSMA
Intel 82855GME "855GME" northbridge with 82801DB "ICH4" southbridge
1 "Mini-AGP" port (proprietary connector)
1 32-bit/33 MHz PCI slot
1 PCMCIA Type I/II port
1 CompactFlash Type I/II slot
onboard Intel Extreme Graphics 2 video with analog VGA and digital LVDS output
2 USB 2.0 ports
Commell MA-ATI "Mini-AGP" card
ATi M10 core, aka Mobility Radeon 9600
64 MB of 128-bit DDR RAM, clocked at 350 MHz
AGP 4x/8x operation
VGA, DVI, LVDS, and S-video output options

1024 MB PC3200 DDR RAM
40 GB Samsung SpinPoint M MP0402H hard drive
E-Mu 1212M Digital Audio System

http://www.freepgs.com/uploadall/upload4/PC_closeup.jpg

http://www.freepgs.com/uploadall/upload4/LV-671NSMA_bare.jpg

http://www.freepgs.com/uploadall/upload4/MA-ATI_bare.jpg

http://www.freepgs.com/uploadall/upload4/heatsink_detail.jpg

http://www.freepgs.com/uploadall/upload4/desk_area.jpg

Interesting facts (in my opinion):
The entire system is cooled by a single 70 mm fan, running at about 1500 RPM.
The power supply is a fanless, external Fortron 60 watt unit
The chassis, minus power supply, measures 2.75" tall, 12.5" wide, and 10.5" deep.


edit: Forgot to mention costs. The motherboard costed about $325, the videocard, about $225. The Pentium M 735 costed me about $300 at time of purchase.

[BigBadBiologist]

very nice! Do you have a pic of the graphics card in the mobo?

[xonik]

In the fourth picture, the videocard is off to the left of the processor heatsink/fan unit. It sits parallel to the motherboard, so maybe that's why you didn't catch it. In the second picture, you can see the white-colored slot between the CMOS battery and the CPU.

[BigBadBiologist]

oh, yeah, now I see it. That is really cool. Who sells the mobo (or can you get it right from Commell)?

[xonik]

http://www.globalamericaninc.com (I bought it from here. They prefer volume customers, but I've received good customer and technical support from them.)
http://store.mini-system.net/lv671.html
http://www.bwi.com/scripts/site/site_category.php3/id/7933/action/configure

[chrisf6969]

cool, I can't wait until the Pentium M mobos become reasonably priced.

I think Asus's adapter/mobo combo will put some serious pressure on DFI's $260 mobo. Plus there are supposed to be some 915 mini-itx mobos coming out for Pentium M's too.

What was the total cost of system. Just for reference.
(case, HD, CD, etc... since those are all a little more expensive that standard desktop components also)

[xonik]

Hard drive was about $80. By the way, it's the quietest drive I've ever heard. It makes the 3.5" Samsung drives seem loud. DVD/CD-RW drive (Panasonic CW-8123) costed a reasonable $60. Case was ridiculous--$150 shipped. Sure, it has a 3/8" anodized aluminum front panel and sound design, but it's not worth $150. I wanted something nice, so I guess I paid the price. Adapters for the drives costed about $7 each. The heatsink/fan costed $10. The other spare heatsinks costed like $0.50 each.

Total cost: just under $1000. I'm really happy with how it turned out.

[Jason711]

man, thats sweet... does nvidia have any mini-agp cards like that?

[Spaceninja]

Yeah the mini-itx cases are a rip off, there is about 1/5 of the material in those cases than there is in my $60 full atx case. I built a mini system to do all my college work on, runs like a champ, but ended up using one of those fugly old Gateway desktop/tower cases. Couldn't beat the price. FREE!!

[xonik]

man, thats sweet... does nvidia have any mini-agp cards like that?"Mini-AGP" is an unofficial, proprietary specification. It's almost like the predecessor to the MXM/Axiom initiatives. There's only one other "Mini-AGP" card I know of, which only has a 2D graphics core with DVI output.

[Jason711]

interesting.

again.. cool system. :D

[chrisf6969]

Total cost: just under $1000. I'm really happy with how it turned out.

I added it up to about $1150 ? Kinda expensive. But very nice.

I'm hoping in the near future you can buy some mini-ITX boards and a LV Celeron M like 1.1Ghz, with a 915G chipset, etc... that would be nice.
Like this.... http://forums.legitreviews.com/viewtopic.php?t=1591 except mini-itx (at a reasonable price)

Something like VIA's Epia boards. That would be great for some office boxes, HTTP's, etc.. (everything but a gaming box)

Its just too expensive right now, for a 855 chipset. I'm hoping the 915 will be cheaper (and it adds dual channel DDR2 533)

[ScHpAnKy]

$325 motherboard?!! Holy shit

[xonik]

I added it up to about $1150 ?Yeah, the soundcard (~$150) was purchased later on. It's wholly unnecessary for most people.

[Snobok]

Hey, where did you get the mini-AGP card from anyhow?

[xonik]

Same place as the motherboard, globalamericaninc.com

[incomudro]

nice i might make myself one of these when i head off to college or w/e

[Artluo100]

nice man, what kind of case is that? I love your monitor :D

[nsc1120]

ive been think of making a mini-itx system for a little bit now but prices on mobos are outragious right now, the epia ones dont have that fast of cpus and the ones where you can use your own are really expensive :(

[xonik]

nice man, what kind of case is that? I love your monitor :DThe case is a Travla C137. Thanks for your comments.

[USMC2Hard4U]

How does it perform and can you compare the performance to a certain desktop CPU.

Not Games just everything else? :)

[xonik]

To give you a rough idea, the performance runs somewhere between the 2.0 and the 2.53 GHz Pentium Ms in these benchmarks,

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=dfipm&page=8

[USMC2Hard4U]

AHH I hate benchmarks!

I want a real life persons Point if view and expirance.

[ShuttleLuv]

Bechmarks do tell a certain tale...but I agree...alot of it is personal hands on. :) :cool:

[xonik]

AHH I hate benchmarks!

I want a real life persons Point if view and expirance.Ok, then.

Games had real spotty reliability before I added new heatsinks on the CPU, GPU, and northbridge. After that, performance is pretty much what you would expect from an ATi Mobility Radeon 9600 at high resolutions. At resolutions 1280x720 and below, the strong CPU performance is not different from that of an Athlon 64 FX-55 or -57, if such a CPU exists.

I don't do very long stretches of media encoding, as all of my audio and video content are ripped straight off the disc. Another computer, a dual 2.8 GHz Xeon platform, handles FLAC encoding among other things, so I haven't checked that kind of performance.

I frequently use MATLAB and OrCAD applications for my engineering work, nothing too involved though. When I want a high-resolution simulation of a given waveform or Fourier transform in OrCAD, I've noticed that the simulation times are roughly 25% faster than the P4 3.0E systems at school.

Multitasking is okay so far, not great. I'm probably going to replace the Samsung 5400 RPM drive because of its relatively poor seek times--but who can blame it? That's probably the big multitasking bottleneck right now, not so much the non-SMT/HT Pentium M architecture and 1 GB of PC3200.

[ScHpAnKy]

Plus there are supposed to be some 915 mini-itx mobos coming out for Pentium M's too.


Can you validate this a little more?
I'm extremely interested in seeing i915 for Dothan (Sonoma, yay!)

[nsc1120]

i remeber seeing something on here or some computer mod site and the mobo was small then a nano-itx one he was like holding it in his palm, it was probably like 3 inches squared and used a cf card for hdd but i cant find the link and now i really wanna find it. also i remeber he put it in a plexi case if that helps. anyone know where this is or have a link

[EnderW]

nice system
very original

[chrisf6969]

Can you validate this a little more?
I'm extremely interested in seeing i915 for Dothan (Sonoma, yay!)

Intel has said it will bring the Pentium M to the HTPC market (but not desktop?!)

So I would think that they would make something like the link I posted before (http://forums.legitreviews.com/viewtopic.php?t=1591), but mini-itx for a SMALL set top box...

And there are already mini-itx boards based on the 855's like the one used in this thread. so why wouldn't they make a mini-itx based on the above linked 915 mobo. etc...

IT WILL HAPPEN. And mobo makers will make some desktop boards too, just like DFI's current 855 mobo. There will be some based on the 915 chipset soon.

[sleepeeg3]

Well there's already the AOpen i915 board. ...but that's mATX, not mITX.

Man, if only you could stick a 6800 Ultra Go card in that system, that would be a dream come true! Smaller than an Xbox, portable and you would be able to do everything on it!

Nice looking system though. Sweet power reqs, too. :cool: