Mini-ITX (or other tiny form factor) case recommendation?

[v8envy]

Hi all,

Was wondering if any of you have run across any truly small and light cases+motherboards fitting the following bill:

1. must house a dual core ia64 CPU. I'm leaning towards Intel at the moment, but won't immediately discount an AMD solution
2. have an external eSATA connection
3. be small and light
4. noise is not a giant issue

Room for internal hard drives an optical drives is unnecessary. I'm assuming on-board graphics. Room for PCI and PCIe slots is not a requirement. I'm guessing mini-itx is probably my best bet, no idea re: who makes mini-itx cases which cool well enough for a modern CPU and who makes reliable power supplies to go with them

The intended application is a PC I can put into my carry-on luggage which has decent IO rates and CPU oomph comprable to a modern desktop. I'd be using external eSATA drives for the IO part. I'm thinking a 930 will be enough CPU for the moment.

 

[Zepper]

Mini ITX is designed to run low power processors - mainly the VIA/Cyrix type that require little or no cooling and are generally dog-slow relative to hotter CPU systems. Personally, I think that you are wanting something that's unobtainable at present - "compact form factor" and "dual core" are antithetical. Perhaps you could use two or more in a network-processing arrangement ...

I just read John Varley's "Mammoth" (which I highly recommend - even though the "F" word was used unnecessarily). What you would need is similar to the "time machine" envisioned there.

.bh.

 

[keeleysam]

Rip apart a Core Duo laptop.

 

[cheesehead]

I'd get a Core Duo laptop motherboard, or the IWill dual-opteron SFF that they released a while back. Shuttle makes some nice stuff, too.
If cost is no problem, then go for an industrial single-board computer using a late-model Intel chipest. They've got all the good stuff built on, and you can often add more if necessary. The downside is the cost; they're at least a thousand or so.

 

[pkrush]

Get a Commell LV-674 or LV-677D motherboard from logicsupply.com and for the case, maybe a Travla c138 with the 120 watt power brick. As for the eSATA, you can get PCI brackets for that.