On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 at 03:08:42PM -0800, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > Hi list, I just wanted to follow up with my final decision for the sake of completion. > > I've got to put in an additional system at work with a high-level of > USB support (camera's, ugh). I'm looking for something that is a > pretty small form factor as space is a definite consideration. I came > across cappuccino pc's ( www.cappuccinopc.com ) and they've got some > nice looking stuff. Several with an extra pci slot (required for more > USB support) and many of them claim linux compatibility. Any one have > any experience with these machines? Any other recommendations? > > the main consideration is lots of USB as I've got to run 4-5 usb > cameras off the things and I know they can suck up some USB bandwidth > real fast. > I finally settled on building my own box (who wouldn't?) using a Via Epia SP-13000 mobo with .5G ram and an old 2.2G laptop HD I had lying around (no local storage, all video will be saved on a server, so just need a boot and basic software, no X). I put it all in a nice little iStar S3 Storm Series box. Okay, this is a sweet little mobo with good linux support, all VIA chips. Its clocked at 1.3 ghz, takes one stick of 184 pin DDR up to 2G (I think). it has one pci slot, 2 ide channels, 2 sata channels, on board gigabit ethernet, video and audio. and dang its tiny! One problem -- though the specs say its got up to 8 usb ports (2 onboard and 3 more pins for headers) its only actually got one usb2.0 controller. It looks like it might have 3 usb1.1 controllers, but I'm not real good at deciphering that. The result is that all my usb is ending up on the one controller no matter how I configure things. I may have to add a pci-usb card if my usb get saturated. So, other than that one little thing, I highly recommend this mobo. The box is pretty sweet too. it has 80w power supply (hopefully that's enough). Fit and finish is real nice. includes a whole bunch of different cable options, plus front panel firewire/usb/audio. includes the pci-riser required to get that one pci card in. has room for 1 2.5 or 3.5" HD and one slim optical drive. case fan is very quiet and is set to exhaust such that its pulling air across the hd/pci region. again, recommended. enjoy A
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