Saturday, May 8, 2004
Media Center PC In Small Form Factor
Posted by Suhit Gupta in "ARTICLE" @ 03:00 AM
"When you last read about Spirit (my hand-built, mini-ITX-based living-room PC) almost two months ago, it was adroitly handling conventional computing tasks. Its 3-D graphics capabilities, however, significantly lagged behind what was required to kick my Xbox out of the home-theater cabinet. Likewise, its jerky PVR (personal-video-recorder) playback performance left my ReplayTV feeling unthreatened about its prospective obsolescence.
Time and technology predictably advance in lock step, however, and I've made progress optimizing the original system based on Via's 1-GHz C3 Nehemiah processor. Incremental hardware- and software-tweaking produces diminishing returns, however, and, beyond a certain point, no amount of fine-tuning and customization effort will turn a Yugo into a Ferrari. So, I'll also discuss the results I obtained when I swapped out Via's M10000 motherboard for a mini-ITX alternative from Lippert, based on an Intel 1.6-MHz Pentium M processor."
A nice article about building your own home media PC in a small form factor which is great for gaming and serves as an excellent PVR/DVR. It is definitely worth reading. Benchmarks for the PC are available here. If you are interested in reading part 1 of this article where the PC was initially built, you can read about it here.
Time and technology predictably advance in lock step, however, and I've made progress optimizing the original system based on Via's 1-GHz C3 Nehemiah processor. Incremental hardware- and software-tweaking produces diminishing returns, however, and, beyond a certain point, no amount of fine-tuning and customization effort will turn a Yugo into a Ferrari. So, I'll also discuss the results I obtained when I swapped out Via's M10000 motherboard for a mini-ITX alternative from Lippert, based on an Intel 1.6-MHz Pentium M processor."
A nice article about building your own home media PC in a small form factor which is great for gaming and serves as an excellent PVR/DVR. It is definitely worth reading. Benchmarks for the PC are available here. If you are interested in reading part 1 of this article where the PC was initially built, you can read about it here.
