Mini-ITX system (sort of a review)

[Yu Meng Chong]

Hi all, 

So, I finally bought the parts and built my first mini-ITX mini-server.
It was quite an experience because I haven't actually built a PC in a
very long time (several years). Several things tripped me up, such as
the HDMI/DVI interface instead of VGA, the power cabling and even
mounting the motherboard and organizing the cables in such a small
space.

I bought a Silverstone SG05 enclosure because the other casings had
rather "gay" designs embossed on them, and the SG05 had a very
impressive looking (i.e. masculine) fan in the front.

Surprisingly (or maybe not), the whole thing works better with OpenSUSE
than with Windows Server or even XP (I tested with OpenSUSE 11.4, W2003
server 32-bit and 64-bit, XP 32-bit and 64-bit and Vista 64-bit). I
spent about 40 minutes in total setting up OpenSUSE, but 4+ hours trying
to get XP installed. Unless you are using 32-bit Vista, every other
Windows OS will give you problems.

One thing I find remarkable about it are the thermals. I am using a AMD
Zacate CPU with the Hudson chipset, and the running temperatures I get
are about 10 degrees higher than ambient temperature -- all this without
a CPU fan and passive cooling only! On the particularly hot day I was
testing it, it ran at 55 degrees Celsius with ambient temperature around
40 degrees. I expected it to go much higher than that, possibly burning
out the components.

Currently, it is deployed at a customer site, "burning in" as it were.
No air-conditioning there and so far, it has been running between 45
and 40 degrees. Pretty amazing to me!

Performance-wise, it's not really good enough for desktop use IMHO. It's
about the same as the 6 year old IBM PC I have, running on a P4 chip.
After an initial setup of XP, memory utilization shot up to 3.3GB and
then a couple of virtual memory warnings came up. I think the 64-bit
drivers tend to leak memory. On OpenSUSE, it runs fine and adequately
fast, but that's not really saying much, because I have found that Linux
runs well on all kinds of hardware.

Not sure how useful these observations are to list members, but I
thought I'd just put in my 2 cents.

Regards,
pascal chong