Just built my first ITX format computer. The board has a VIA C3 EDEN 933MHz cpu built onto the board.This cpu consumes a whole watt of power when running at full speed…yes ONE watt and needs no fan. The board itself has a footprint of 17cm x 17cm and the tallest component on the finished machine is the DDR SDRAM module. Adding a standard IDE hard disk forms the basis of a very tidy workstation. The board has AGP 8x graphics, PS/2 ports, 4x USB2.0 and 2x IEEE1394 as well as 2x serial, 1x parallel and 5.1 audio built on, as well as a 100Base TX LAN, 56k modem, 2x UDMA133 and FDD interfaces and an I2C bus. Oh, and SPDIF and S-Video and Composite out. Intended for digital media applications and compact workstations, it’s a very tidy board and runs at least as well as a 1GHz Duron or Celeron. The board with a 512Mb DDR RAM module only uses a total of 7 watts of power and with a UDMA133 40Gb drive and a low profile ITX CD ROM drive, runs perfectly well from a miniature 140w ATX power supply. The system is silent apart from the whirring of the hard disk, and runs at room temperature with no additional cooling or fans.
At a cost of less than ?65 (US$100) for the board and processor with all these features, this seems to be a very economical, power efficient and space saving concept. The finished machine is smaller than a ream of printer paper! Of course, to use the PCI slot (there is one on the board, just in case the system doesn’t provide a feature you need….SCSI perhaps?) you will need a slightly larger case, but many ATX cases have locations to mount ITX format boards.
Anyone else had a chance to play with an ITX system? What are your impressions of this excellent new format?