- Jan 16, 2001
- 31,528
- 3
- 76
Yesterday I completed my first mini-ITX system. I was inspired by this thread on the VB7001, posted by thorin.
This isn't a professional (or thorough) review of the board; just a "hey check this out" type thread and so I can give my first impressions of the board.
The board Via VB7001G mini-ITX motherboard is pretty darn compact for something so full-featured. It's new home is an iSTAR S3 case.
I didn't take any pictures of the naked board or the empty case, but took lots of pics after assembly.
Here's a shot from the left side. You can see how the slim-CDRom and hard drive mount to the upper cage piece/top brace. Left side open
You can also see what a tight fit the CDR is with the converter adapter and cable attached. I had to attach the cable first, then slide it into the carrier. Here's a closeup of the adapter. It converts the slim-CD plug to a normal 40-pin IDE connection. CDAdapter The converter plug takes a standard floppy power plug (you can't see it...it's under the IDE cable) and that was a PITA tight fit.
Here's a pic from the right side showing the slim 80mm fan and the MB resting comfortably. Right side open The small board on the extreme left is the PCB for the front panel connectors.
A nice bonus about this case was that all the wires for the front panel are removable. The board doesn't have Firewire so that wire came out. I'm not using the front panel audio either, so that cable is gone too.
As you can see in this pic and in this other pic there is not a whole lot of room for anything extra in there! Believe it or not, I really did try to make it neat. But with so little room to work with it was difficult. The Molex-->SATA power cable adapter I had to use didn't help.
In this shot you can see the ATX power board on the right hand side. For those who know nothing about mini-ITX (I knew nothing until I did this project), most mini-ITX cases are so small that they use an external laptop-type power brick.
A single normal "wall wart" round plug carries 12volts DC from the brick into the case. Two wires connect that plug with the daughter board in the case. That board splits the power to a 20-pin ATX cable and a second cable that breaks out into a single big Molex and two floppy connectors.
Here's the ATX and secondary cables coming off that little board
Here's the backpanel It's definitely Home Theater ready. S-video and coaxial SPIDF out. As you can see in the pic, the case will take a PCI card (on a riser card) but only if you are using a 2.5" laptop HD. I wanted lots of space, so I went with a full size 3.5" drive...which admittedly made it a tight, but managable squeeze.
Some more pics. Front panel USB.
Standing up in it's new home next to my printer
With a CD just for size comparison's sake. This thing is small!
The case does have front panel Power LED but it's bright enough to signal spacecraft, so I disconnected it. The HD LED is red and pretty dull so I left that one attached. The case's power supply is an 80w latptop brick. After running overnight, the brick is barely warm to the touch. I like this low-power ITX stuff.
OK, on to the board itself. First, the CPU HSF. It is NOT a buzzsaw. In fact, it's totally silent. You cannot hear it spin at all. I was worried it was going to be a buzzsaw as most tiny little 40mm fans are. This one is great. IMO, the heatsink doesn't get hot but it does get warm. I'm 99% sure you could disconnect the fan provided you have case airflow, which this case does. And the fan is almost (not quite) silent too boot. From 3 feet away it's barely audible in a silent room.
The board works well; benchmarking it against say a C2D system is pointless b/c that's not this board's target market. It just works. The onboard video did 1280x1024 32-bit color perfectly on my LCD. I hooked it up to my old LCD; I didn't test it at any higher res than that so I'm not sure what max res is.
Oh, the board didn't come with a user manual either which was not cool. Granted it took me all of 2 minutes to find and download it, but it should've come with one. It DID come with an IDE cable and a 44-pin-->40-pin laptop HD converter cable, which will be nice to have should I ever swap out the drives. The driver CD contains exactly 78MB of drivers and half of those are Linux. Driver footprint is small.
USB 2.0 works fantastic on all ports, front and rear. The sound works too. *shrug* It's sound...what else can I say?
I threw a CD burner into the mix b/c this system doubles as a spare/backup system.
The primary function of the box is for online storage. It's my "NAS." I run Ghost backup jobs on my main box, saving to this box. As you guys know, when it comes to backups, it goes:
Good - backup to another partiton
Better - backup to another hard drive
Best - backup to another hard drive on a completely different box :thumbsup:
I already have an external USB2.0 HD that I use for that purpose, but I was looking for a project and something cool to build.
I'm very happy with the board, it runs cool and quiet and does what it's supposed to. I surfed the net on the box for a few hours yesterday...even streamed some Youtube. Worked great.
I'm running XPSP2 and I run it headless; manage it via RDP.
I'm not sure what other questions you guys would like answers to...so fire away.
Thanks for reading!
This isn't a professional (or thorough) review of the board; just a "hey check this out" type thread and so I can give my first impressions of the board.
The board Via VB7001G mini-ITX motherboard is pretty darn compact for something so full-featured. It's new home is an iSTAR S3 case.
I didn't take any pictures of the naked board or the empty case, but took lots of pics after assembly.
Here's a shot from the left side. You can see how the slim-CDRom and hard drive mount to the upper cage piece/top brace. Left side open
You can also see what a tight fit the CDR is with the converter adapter and cable attached. I had to attach the cable first, then slide it into the carrier. Here's a closeup of the adapter. It converts the slim-CD plug to a normal 40-pin IDE connection. CDAdapter The converter plug takes a standard floppy power plug (you can't see it...it's under the IDE cable) and that was a PITA tight fit.
Here's a pic from the right side showing the slim 80mm fan and the MB resting comfortably. Right side open The small board on the extreme left is the PCB for the front panel connectors.
A nice bonus about this case was that all the wires for the front panel are removable. The board doesn't have Firewire so that wire came out. I'm not using the front panel audio either, so that cable is gone too.
As you can see in this pic and in this other pic there is not a whole lot of room for anything extra in there! Believe it or not, I really did try to make it neat. But with so little room to work with it was difficult. The Molex-->SATA power cable adapter I had to use didn't help.
In this shot you can see the ATX power board on the right hand side. For those who know nothing about mini-ITX (I knew nothing until I did this project), most mini-ITX cases are so small that they use an external laptop-type power brick.
A single normal "wall wart" round plug carries 12volts DC from the brick into the case. Two wires connect that plug with the daughter board in the case. That board splits the power to a 20-pin ATX cable and a second cable that breaks out into a single big Molex and two floppy connectors.
Here's the ATX and secondary cables coming off that little board
Here's the backpanel It's definitely Home Theater ready. S-video and coaxial SPIDF out. As you can see in the pic, the case will take a PCI card (on a riser card) but only if you are using a 2.5" laptop HD. I wanted lots of space, so I went with a full size 3.5" drive...which admittedly made it a tight, but managable squeeze.
Some more pics. Front panel USB.
Standing up in it's new home next to my printer
With a CD just for size comparison's sake. This thing is small!
The case does have front panel Power LED but it's bright enough to signal spacecraft, so I disconnected it. The HD LED is red and pretty dull so I left that one attached. The case's power supply is an 80w latptop brick. After running overnight, the brick is barely warm to the touch. I like this low-power ITX stuff.
OK, on to the board itself. First, the CPU HSF. It is NOT a buzzsaw. In fact, it's totally silent. You cannot hear it spin at all. I was worried it was going to be a buzzsaw as most tiny little 40mm fans are. This one is great. IMO, the heatsink doesn't get hot but it does get warm. I'm 99% sure you could disconnect the fan provided you have case airflow, which this case does. And the fan is almost (not quite) silent too boot. From 3 feet away it's barely audible in a silent room.
The board works well; benchmarking it against say a C2D system is pointless b/c that's not this board's target market. It just works. The onboard video did 1280x1024 32-bit color perfectly on my LCD. I hooked it up to my old LCD; I didn't test it at any higher res than that so I'm not sure what max res is.
Oh, the board didn't come with a user manual either which was not cool. Granted it took me all of 2 minutes to find and download it, but it should've come with one. It DID come with an IDE cable and a 44-pin-->40-pin laptop HD converter cable, which will be nice to have should I ever swap out the drives. The driver CD contains exactly 78MB of drivers and half of those are Linux. Driver footprint is small.
USB 2.0 works fantastic on all ports, front and rear. The sound works too. *shrug* It's sound...what else can I say?
I threw a CD burner into the mix b/c this system doubles as a spare/backup system.
The primary function of the box is for online storage. It's my "NAS."
I run Ghost backup jobs on my main box, saving to this box. As you guys know, when it comes to backups, it goes:Good - backup to another partiton
Better - backup to another hard drive
Best - backup to another hard drive on a completely different box :thumbsup:
I already have an external USB2.0 HD that I use for that purpose, but I was looking for a project and something cool to build.
I'm very happy with the board, it runs cool and quiet and does what it's supposed to. I surfed the net on the box for a few hours yesterday...even streamed some Youtube. Worked great.
I'm running XPSP2 and I run it headless; manage it via RDP.
I'm not sure what other questions you guys would like answers to...so fire away.
Thanks for reading!
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