For anyone who's interested, I've been running FreeBSD 4.8 on the EPIA-10000M mini-ITX for at least a couple months now; it's available for as little as $160 with CPU + motherboard + case + p/s bought integrated as the FIC Falcon CR53, and there's a surprising amount of I/O integrated onboard. For anybody who's looking to build cheap but reasonably powerful servers or desktop machines, this looks like a winner.
seconded - i'm hugely chuffed with mine, it runs really quiet.
I haven't run any real benchmarks, but in terms of "feel" it might be equivalent to maybe a 500-600MHz PIII. The total server parts list ran about $350 with shipping, including 7200rpm IDE drive and a 2nd 100BT card (Linksys LNE100TX.) I haven't tried X or the sound capabilities so I'm not sure how suitable it would be for a desktop; I also haven't tested whether the IEEE-1394 would work under FreeBSD. For a low-end server, though, it's pretty nice, and moderately quiet too.
XFree86 is ok under x11-servers/XFree86-4-Server-snap's via code. general desktop performance is fine. sound works too, y'normal pcm(4).
i've had no joy using the integrated "castlerock" mpeg2 decoder in the graphics chipset, and indeed mplayer threw a hissy fit with it. given the youth of the X stuff, this is likely to get better.
The motherboard includes integrated CPU, 1 DDR slot, 4 USB, 2 serial, 1 parallel I/O, 2 IEEE-1394, floppy port, dual IDE, SVGA out + SVHS TV out, 10/100 LAN, and 1 PCI. The IDE interface works at ATA133 under FreeBSD 4.8; the VIA/Realtek ethernet is recognized as vr0. The CPU integrated on the motherboard is a 1GHz VIA C3, an IDT descendant - the newer "Nehemiah" core which is claimed to have better instructions per clock than the older VIA cores.
Matt Dillon posted about the earlier EPIA boards a while back, so I thought I'd add a note that this one also works well.
-- Clifton, not a VIA salesrep
me neither!
Andrew Gallatin wrote: > Clifton Royston writes: > > For anyone who's interested, I've been running FreeBSD 4.8 on the > > EPIA-10000M mini-ITX for at least a couple months now; it's > > available > > Cool! Have you measured the power consumption?
if i find a suitable gizmo, i'll do so :)
cheers, l.
-- [EMAIL PROTECTED] +44 020 8742 0755 http://www.aldigital.co.uk/ system administrivia c6 h8 o7 http://www.thebunker.net/
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