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mini-itx, is the move worth it?
osiris:
HI all,
I have a mini-arcade cab i built myself (almost done, minus finished marquee, side art, and plexi). my problem is that right now the whole thing is run from outside of the cab by a 800mhz p3 box, which is ugly, and quite noisy.
Im pretty happy with the preformance though, slowdown seldom occurs, and if it does, it occurs pretty much when i remember there being slowdown at the arcade.
Happy that is until i started thinking about mini-itx for the job, although im a pretty big nerd, Ive never used one, and dont really know how fast they run.
my current system specs are :
800mhz p3
348megs of ram that i had laying around
geforce 4 pci out of a scraped project
so nothing too special, just wondering what kind of mini-itx would give me similar or slightly better preformance (integrated graphics with rca out a plus, im using a 19"tv that suites my needs perfectly )
Thanks
Jakobud:
I don't 'think' the mini-itx will give better performance. The 1ghz mini-itx cyrix-ish chip is equivalent in speed to about a p3-450mhz... Would be ideal for classics though.
Edgedamage:
Check here:
http://neogeo.orntar.net/
He has neo geo games running. I have talked with him through PM's and he says his games run silky smooth.
rampy:
--- Quote from: Jakobud on March 01, 2004, 02:19:14 pm ---I don't 'think' the mini-itx will give better performance. The 1ghz mini-itx cyrix-ish chip is equivalent in speed to about a p3-450mhz... Would be ideal for classics though.
--- End quote ---
Jakobud... I'm curious as to how you arrived at that figure. I know cyrix stuff in the past has been lagging, and yes intel stuff had the fast FPU performance at comprable clockspeeds... but I'm pretty sure these "new" mini-itx via boards perform at comprable "flops" as an intel/AMD counterpart at the same clockspeed.
I don't have one in my possesion yet to give you actual benchmarks... but eventually I will (and will put em a review on Build your own PVR/HTPC community site)
planetjay has one (the via epia m10000 I beleive) and his opinion anecdotally was that it was as fast as a comprably clocked intel/amd system... not to put text in pj's er... mouth... (I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm off the mark)
To the original poster, does your TV have svideo inputs (the mini-itx via epia m10000 does have both rca video out as well as svideo so I'm not sure why I ask)?
Now Transmeta chips are a different story... I've gota 1ghz one of those and was a little dissapointed in the MAME performance on it...
What was the question again? :P
rampy
osiris:
--- Quote from: rampy on March 01, 2004, 03:25:24 pm ---
--- Quote from: Jakobud on March 01, 2004, 02:19:14 pm ---I don't 'think' the mini-itx will give better performance. The 1ghz mini-itx cyrix-ish chip is equivalent in speed to about a p3-450mhz... Would be ideal for classics though.
--- End quote ---
To the original poster, does your TV have svideo inputs (the mini-itx via epia m10000 does have both rca video out as well as svideo so I'm not sure why I ask)?
--- End quote ---
No, my tv is an older 19" toshiba(dont know the model number) that i picked up at a pawn shop for cheap, it has composit video, and mono sound in. While it sounds weak, the cab is pretty small and running the sound and video through it "feels" right, and no one playing has complained yet.