Wednesday, March 3, 2010

An ITX format PC - Small Desktop Media PC - SDMPC

At the present time there are a few Atom based ITX motherboards and now AM2+ (AM3) and 775 socket boards are coming onto the market.

An investigatory exercise was made to see the viability of a Quad Processor based SDMPC

The requirements here are for a small media computer that has one HDD (possibly a 2.5" SSD) - just for booting, an intregal video chipset and enough USB and/or external SATA connections for external drives.

There is no requirement for an optical drive (BD) as all the media is to be stored on external SATA drives in docking station.

Zotac ITX Motherboards

There seem to be 3 different Intel boards and 1 AMD. The preference was for AMD
Saw a mention of a DFI (a company) unleashing an Intel lga 1156 socket p55 chipset based mini itx board in Q1 2010  - decided to go with the Zotac


Zotac GF8200-C-E Motherboard

This was ordered with an AMD Phenom II X4 CPU. The CPU, at 140W, will have to be used on the Windows 7 box as the ITX board has a recommended 65W maximum TDP for its processor. It is not known at the present time whether the AMD 550 (95W) will be safe to use on the ITX I may have to re-source for a lower TDP chip.

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