Tong Family

I’m just about to buy a mini ITX machine to do DVD playback and other small games and things for Grace. An interesting test to see how a small form factor machine does.
mini-itx.com – nehemiah m10000 review. The benchmark shows that with 256MB of PC2100 RAM and Windows XP, it does DVD playback just fine, but if you are doing Divx or Xvid with AC3 playback, then you’ll prbably have to go to a 1GHz EPIA M10000, the fanless EPIA ME6000 is just not fast enough. That’s too bad, but good data. The main thing is to get a later generation Nehemiah M10000 which has a full floating point unit. The tradeoff is that a fan generates about 25dBA of noise so a little above a whisper level of about 20dBA in an average room at 1 meter away.
“Tech Report”:http://techreport.com/reviews/2003q2/epia-m10000/ shows similar data and actually decent performance with Microsoft Office, comparable to a Pentium III 900MHz machine.
“Envynews”:http://www.envynews.com/index.php?ID=446 did a test showing that the 1GHz Nehemiah is bout 2-5x slower than an Athlon XP 1900+ in CPU intensive benchmarks like MP3 encoding (something you shouldn’t do with it anyway).
Here is what I ended up getting is either the Logic Supply kit that is $543 or a roll your own component set.