I ordered one of these low-profile Pegatron NM70-T1 motherboards direct from Zoostorm after seeing this so here's a little info on it.
The board came with the tall I/O shield, Delta mains power supply, generic Realtek mini PCIe wi-fi card with 1 pigtail cable and a pair of SATA data/power cables to power a HDD straight off the mobo. No paperwork or driver CD.
The part ref. was 1470-0000 and the price £50 + £12.50 postage + VAT = £75 so not too bad considering it comes with PSU.
I just added a cheap Kingston mSATA SSD and a stick of RAM. The only thing missing was 2 screws to hold the mini PCIe cards down. I took these out of a random CDROM drive I had lying around. They are tiny!
The only other cost was my donation to China Labor Watch as penance for supporting the bad ethics of Pegatron!
The CPU fan is pretty quiet, just trickling away really and as the rig is behind a glass door I can't hear it. Unless something maxes out the CPU for ages causing it to run at full speed!
The BIOS is not that flexible in terms of options. Can't disable the onboard LVDS display though you can do this in GRUB or Windows.
The wifi card is pretty flaky but that might be due to me only connecting one antenna to the included pigtail. There are 2 sockets on the card so you could connect 2 pigtails.
Other than that, no complaints and it seems to be surviving in a fanless case.
Hope that gives someone some information!
Hi, I'm new here but I followed this thread from the start, as I've been looking to build/buy a htpc/nas combo on the cheap and I like the idea of using the 1037u. I am based in the UK and I actually wrote to Zoostorm about their mini desktop pc and they got back to me fairly quickly. You are right about the motherboard! here is their full answer:
"Yes the PC will support a slimline optical drive, but will not support additional SATA hardware.
The hard drive used is a 320GB WD Scorpio Blue 2.5" SATA, you can replace this with a larger one if you so wish.
The motherboard currently used is Pegatron NM70-T1 thin mini-ITX board & PSU, Celeron 1037u"
I also asked them to confirm whether the motherboard comes with a tall I/O shield and whether there is a way this machine can take an expansion slot bracket for PCI-E tuner card for example. Their reply :
"Unfortunately the unit will not support expansion cards such as a TV tuner card, but will obviously support a USB alternative."
I was thinking of buying this and adding an SSD and a 2 or 4TB HDD - but now I'm not so sure. I've never built a machine before, but hope that it is something that I can do as I've frequently tinkered with computers adding and removing components (albeit last time I've done this was in 2003!).
I would like to put together something that has a bluray drive, room for 2 HDDs (preferably 3.5" as they're cheaper) , an very small SSD (for OS, I will run a light linux distro so 8gb should be ok ?). and ideally, room for a pcie dvb-t2 tuner as well as usb 3.0 for future storage expansion if needed.
Any recommendation on motherboard + case ?
I just need this to play 1080p video (via XBMC), while running SABnzbd and couchpotatoe in the background. and with an SMB share occasionally accessed by other computers in the house.
Cheers !
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