First Pico-ITX Review

Looking interesting. Issue I see is that it is too small to be useful in many cases. Expansion is an issue and the addon card for audio is huge. Should have been stacked under it. Thing will also prob be expensive. I'm interested in it. Would love to use some of these things as music players around the house or something. Just look at mini-itx as a better option.
 
swatbat said:
Looking interesting. Issue I see is that it is too small to be useful in many cases. Expansion is an issue and the addon card for audio is huge. Should have been stacked under it. Thing will also prob be expensive. I'm interested in it. Would love to use some of these things as music players around the house or something. Just look at mini-itx as a better option.
Click to expand...

Yes, they do look very interesting. I also have to agree, expansion would be an issue since, well, they're so small. I personally would love to have one (so would many others i do not doubt), but they are expensive, i saw somewhere (cant remember now) that they were priced about $600 or so but, dont hold this to me as i could be wrong.
 
I'm thinking this could be turned into a kick ass cell phone.

With a different heatsink, a slim case with somewhere to mount an LCD, a couple high capacity batteries, a flash drive for storage, a wifi card, and a slid out QWERTY (or touchscreen LCD, iPhone style.), you would have a pretty powerful smart phone with voip capabilities. Or, with some hacking (hard and soft based), you could prolly jam the guts of a regular phone in the case, then use an emu to boot into the firmware of the phone when you wanted to make a call. If you used a big enough flash drive and added a serial port, you could use the thing as an mp3 player as well. Hell, I'd use it, even if it was as thick as a coke can.
 
Good to see low power Motherboard plus CPU, but then for $400 i can buy a laptop with Core Duo Processor plus every thing else, in a low power package.
 
apt403 said:
I'm thinking this could be turned into a kick ass cell phone.

With a different heatsink, a slim case with somewhere to mount an LCD, a couple high capacity batteries, a flash drive for storage, a wifi card, and a slid out QWERTY (or touchscreen LCD, iPhone style.), you would have a pretty powerful smart phone with voip capabilities. Or, with some hacking (hard and soft based), you could prolly jam the guts of a regular phone in the case, then use an emu to boot into the firmware of the phone when you wanted to make a call. If you used a big enough flash drive and added a serial port, you could use the thing as an mp3 player as well. Hell, I'd use it, even if it was as thick as a coke can.
Click to expand...

Sounds like an OQO 02 to me! :D
http://www.oqo.com/

The pico-ITX setup would actually be pretty slick for some embedded applications like carputers, or heck it should be low enough power to start considering a not-ridiculous looking wearable computer.
 
apt403 said:
I'm thinking this could be turned into a kick ass cell phone.

With a different heatsink, a slim case with somewhere to mount an LCD, a couple high capacity batteries, a flash drive for storage, a wifi card, and a slid out QWERTY (or touchscreen LCD, iPhone style.), you would have a pretty powerful smart phone with voip capabilities. Or, with some hacking (hard and soft based), you could prolly jam the guts of a regular phone in the case, then use an emu to boot into the firmware of the phone when you wanted to make a call. If you used a big enough flash drive and added a serial port, you could use the thing as an mp3 player as well. Hell, I'd use it, even if it was as thick as a coke can.
Click to expand...

What you described is basically the upcoming Neo 1973 :) (minus the qwerty keyboard)

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2986976174.html
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo1973
 
Tekara said:
Sounds like an OQO 02 to me! :D
http://www.oqo.com/

The pico-ITX setup would actually be pretty slick for some embedded applications like carputers, or heck it should be low enough power to start considering a not-ridiculous looking wearable computer.
Click to expand...

it would make for a excellent carputer.. just need a decent pico-ITX enclosure now..
 
The Neo1973 looks awesome! Hopefully they'll be available en masse by December. Birthday + christmas = awesome. Getting a GP2X at the same time will be kinda redundant, but oh well.
 
Tekara said:
Sounds like an OQO 02 to me! :D
http://www.oqo.com/

The pico-ITX setup would actually be pretty slick for some embedded applications like carputers, or heck it should be low enough power to start considering a not-ridiculous looking wearable computer.
Click to expand...
I'd like to get one for my home server. I'm currently using a VIA C3 on a mATX board in an open sided mid-tower. mini e-machines 280W psu (which contains the only fan in the setup.) Scaling down size-wise would be great!
 
This is nothing special. You've been able to buy PC-104 plus boards for years (they also feature a PCI bus expansion). Just like the PC-104 boards, you can get basic functionality in a single board, but you need to stack multiple boards to get complete features (the Pico ITX has a stacked I/O board).

http://www.pc104plus.com/index.html

The difference? PC-104 boards are typically built for commercial and military applications, and are also much more expandable than this board (you can stack up to four boards together). Via is pretty late to the party, in my eyes.

At least it's not as bad as the earlier pairing Via had with the Nano ITX featuring Luke, which was just ancient technology. While the C7 is nothing special (just a Nehemiah with twice the cache), the new bus does add a bit more performance to the old platform.
 
defaultluser said:
This is nothing special. You've been able to buy PC-104 plus boards for years (they also feature a PCI bus expansion). Just like the PC-104 boards, you can get basic functionality in a single board, but you need to stack multiple boards to get complete features (the Pico ITX has a stacked I/O board).

http://www.pc104plus.com/index.html

The difference? PC-104 boards are typically built for commercial and military applications, and are also much more expandable than this board (you can stack up to four boards together). Via is pretty late to the party, in my eyes.

At least it's not as bad as the earlier pairing Via had with the Nano ITX featuring Luke, which was just ancient technology. While the C7 is nothing special (just a Nehemiah with twice the cache), the new bus does add a bit more performance to the old platform.
Click to expand...

I've wanted to get a couple of PC-104 boards to play around with but I haven't had much luck obtaining any at a reasonable price. Do you know of any place that sells them? I checked out the pc104plus website and they have boards but they don't list prices. I'm guessing you have to call them for pricing?
 
annaconda said:
Good to see low power Motherboard plus CPU, but then for $400 i can buy a laptop with Core Duo Processor plus every thing else, in a low power package.
Click to expand...

Link to mythical $400 laptop with core duo processor?

/edit: Even assuming it exists....they are totally different. Nobody here seems to understand that these boards were created with very specific requirements, basically, small size, ultra-low power consumption, both which also lend themselves to silent running (passive cooling). You can't associate any of those with a laptop.
 
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