Picked up one of those Walmart $200 specials...

heelix

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 2, 2004
Messages
1,080
Well, the mainboard/CPU anyhow. Going to be messing around with it over the holiday - anyone got any questions on it? Got a couple empty hard drives and all sorts of media, so can load just about anything on it. It will end up being my Subversion (source code) server after the holidays.

(besides, did not want to see 'runs like crap' as the VIA thread anymore)
 
Pics, obviously. Any feedback on user experience / tweaking attempts. How that SVN server works out for you. Network transfer rates, maybe.
 
Wal-Mart sells mainboards and CPUs? Since when?

Or are you harvesting an OEM PC of some sort?
 
If throwing a decent videocard in that thing would make it a good media pc, I'd be all over it.
 
There was another company selling the "Dev" version of the computer for 60 bucks. CPU+MB, no ram, no hd, no case.
 
I'll post pics from my box - but they have much nicer shots where I picked up mine. $59USD, with free shipping for the 'dev' version. This is the same mainboard/cpu that Walmart is using in the $200 version. They even toss in a copy of gOS - the same media that they are using with the board.

http://clubit.com/product_detail.cfm?itemno=CA4842001#

mainboard.jpg


ports.jpg


The system is pretty quite. There is not much of a heat sink on it, so that might be the first thing I update. Wonder if I can go fanless with a better block? Picked up this board to replace a 533mhz mini-itx board that I thought was failing, so for a personal Subversion server with SSH enabled... it is vastly over powered for what I'm using it for.

So far, only two beefs with it.

1) Why did they need the extra 4-pin ATX power connector? With a max power draw of 20W, it means I have to change out the fanless PS I was using before. Need to find out what sort of voltage that is supplying.... might be able to jerry rig something.

2) The CPU is i586. Normally not a big deal. I thought my older ITX board had died after an update, only to "confirm" it when I tried a couple live Linux distros. Turns out, with the exception of the Ubuntu (based) stuff, most versions ship with i686. The machine locks or reboots as soon as it hits i686 code.
 
Whoa! That thing is a lot cheaper then I would of guessed!

Has anyone plugged it into a Kill-A-Watt to see what it's actually consuming?

I wish I knew about that board before I bought my Buffalo NAS. I could of built something with FreeNas for less money that would perform better. :( :)

The whole reason I switched from a server to standalone NAS was for the energy savings..
 
Via hasn't ventured into the Dual Core market, have they? That D isn't indicating that. From what I read its just using break throughs in Carbon, energy efficient, and adds SSE3 instructions. Very green friendly CPU. Hmmmm interesting find though.
 
Is that gOS operating system worth a darn?

Well, its basically Ubuntu "lite", so I'm sure its not bad. Its a free download if you want to try it. You can run it as a "live"cd-based os to try.
From the Wiki:
The gOS distribution is based on the Ubuntu 7.10 distribution. It uses the Enlightenment 17 window manager instead of the usual GNOME or KDE desktops, allowing for lower memory and speed requirements. Therefore gOS starts to work reasonably well on systems as low end as a 1GHz Pentium III with 256MB RAM. Because it leans heavy on on-line applications built on Web 2.0 and AJAX technology it also does not use much hard disk space for applications, the whole system fits comfortably in less than 2 GB. Also many of the documents created with gOS, such as Google Docs documents, can be saved on Google servers instead of on the local hard disk, so gOS can work with very small hard disks. In this respect a gOS PC has many similarities with a Thin client.

gOS primary features include a Mac OS X-like Dock featuring icons for the following applications: Firefox web browser, Google Mail, Google News, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Froogle, the Blogger YouTube and Facebook online communities as well as Meebo to online chat with Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger users, Rhythmbox (ITunes like program for music and radio), Skype, Wikipedia, and the Xine media player. The rightmost icon is for Faqly, a system developed for gOS to offer a built-in online community based help system. Other programs can be added to the Dock as well.

gOS also supports mini applications that run on the desktop, such as the clock.

Also available are a number of card, board and puzzle games, the photo and picture editing program the Gimp and the OpenOffice.org office suite. Thousands of other programs can be installed using the built-in Synaptic Package Manager.

Google desktop search is integrated into the top right-hand corner of the desktop.

gOS is still in the alpha stage and is missing some features, the most obvious being a trashcan.
 
I guess it was was I expected... More or less a dashboard with most of the things my Mom would try and do with a computer - email, chat, youtube, music, surfing. It is a live CD, so pop a copy in the drive and take a look. Should work on most any box. Might want to wait till next week, as version 2.0 of gOS is coming out.

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS3820763454.html

I was putting this into a server - not even running XWindows on this box.

Don't have a killawatt, but I'd believe the 20W max usage. The heat sink they have on it is a tiny block of aluminum, and even that does not get too hot to touch.
 
For sake of comparison, I've been considering upgrading my smoothwall and this would work great.

Just for kicks, Via C3 700mhz, Passive cooling.

LARGE_smoothwall_13.jpg


Idle
LARGE_smoothwall_25.jpg


Full load
LARGE_smoothwall_26.jpg


Sorry for the hijack.. :)
 
For sake of comparison, I've been considering upgrading my smoothwall and this would work great.

Just for kicks, Via C3 700mhz, Passive cooling.

http://mach-five.com/album/thumbnails/Computers/smoothwall/LARGE_smoothwall_13.jpg[/img]

Idle
http://mach-five.com/album/thumbnails/Computers/smoothwall/LARGE_smoothwall_25.jpg[/img]

Full load
LARGE_smoothwall_26.jpg


Sorry for the hijack.. :)
wheres the best place to buy one of those little meters?
 
Everyone pretty much sells them for $20 ... Just try to find a place that does it for free shipping. I got mine from Newegg.
 
Can you try running openbsd with C7 hardware encryption on and throw us some benchies?
 
Too late for me to install BSD... box is in use as a Subversion server now. This something I can do with a live CD?
 
For sake of comparison, I've been considering upgrading my smoothwall and this would work great.

Just for kicks, Via C3 700mhz, Passive cooling.

Full load
LARGE_smoothwall_26.jpg


Sorry for the hijack.. :)

I just tested my 700mhz celeron that runs mono wall, I get 31w without the hard drive, 40w with the hard drive.
 
I got 49 watts at the wall with a dual core 3800+, and 2GB of DDR2. Yep.. AMD rules...lol
 
so where can i pick one of the dev systems? i would seriously use this as my FTP server/ BT box with a 750gb HDD that i got laying around
 
I just bought a gPC2 and a couple gigs of ram off newegg for ~$200. I immediately put XP on it and really its decent for web surfing and working on office docs. I'm seriously thinking about buying a second one and slightly updating my fileserver. :)
 
I just bought a gPC2 and a couple gigs of ram off newegg for ~$200. I immediately put XP on it and really its decent for web surfing and working on office docs. I'm seriously thinking about buying a second one and slightly updating my fileserver. :)

I think I may invest in one of these bad boys, but drop a much larger HDD in it for a home file server. And of course I'd use Ubuntu instead of the gOS :D
 
Looks interesting! May have to see if WMT has any left overs for cheap at the B&M.
 
I'm probably going to be laughed at but would this work as a home server for file serving dvd and HD content to a TV and computer and for periodically backing up systems?
 
I'm probably going to be laughed at but would this work as a home server for file serving dvd and HD content to a TV and computer and for periodically backing up systems?

Yup.

Might want to add in a gigabit NIC card (if you have a gigabit network) and then add hard drives to your hearts content.
 
For sake of comparison, I've been considering upgrading my smoothwall and this would work great.

Just for kicks, Via C3 700mhz, Passive cooling.

LARGE_smoothwall_13.jpg


Idle
LARGE_smoothwall_25.jpg


Full load
LARGE_smoothwall_26.jpg


Sorry for the hijack.. :)

What processor and motherboard are you running here?
 
may as well find used systems on CL or local ads for $100-200 to handle this stuff...
personally my next system will be a core 2 or quad core using a VM for the LAN server stuff...
 
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