And I'm interested in a couple of things...

First off, it'll most likely be Socket 462 or 754, purely from a cost perspective.

Any of you have a favorite board/case/drive combo setup you like?

I want to have something that I can move with me (not necessarily a laptop; I want occasional portability and excellent functionality, not laptop-grade portability) and one question I have is this: does anybody make a 12V power supply for said form factor? Or should I just run it off of an inverter?

5/19/2006 11:40:58 PM

just buy a barebones uATX setup

5/19/2006 11:52:41 PM

make a recommendation.

5/19/2006 11:54:24 PM

antec/shuttle are pretty good picks for mATX cases, and since it's going to be a smaller than normal case i'd go with s754 since it's less heat.

if you're looking at running this in a car visit all the mp3car forums out there, there are tons of 12v PSU options.

5/20/2006 12:19:09 AM

Thanks...yeah, actually in my car/garage/boat.

5/20/2006 12:32:31 AM

i personally like shuttle barebones systems...i want to say that tiger direct over on capital has 12v power supplies for the form factor, but don't hold me to it

5/20/2006 4:44:30 PM

^they dont.

And yea you are going to be much better off getting a barebones case/mobo/cpu than trying to piecemeal something together.

nice thing is you can get core duo processors for socket 478, which is pretty damn sweet. or you can get a Celeron-M for socket 478 for super cheap (and they are actually damn amazing for the price).

I'd pickup one of the 2-3 generation old socket 478 shuttle sff boxes, or find a similarly equipped micro/mini/book pc.

Check out http://www.cappuccinopc.com/ for pretty much all the SFF possiblities, then google the hell out of whatever you find that you want to get a decent price on it.

5/21/2006 12:58:56 AM

i second the mp3car.com forums - that's where 90% of my info came from for my car pc

5/21/2006 1:03:53 AM