[Nottingham] Hardware sought

[Chris Burton]

> OK, here's a challenge for you - I'm looking for nano-ITX motherboards of 
> the
> VIA Eden persuasion. I know Maplin had them in for a bit, and they were
> obscenely expensive from there. I've spotted a couple sites which still 
> carry
> them, but unfortunately won't ship to the UK in orders of less than a
> thousand units (and yes, nano-ITX are very specialised x86 boards).

http://www.icp-epia.co.uk/ have some Nano stuff. ICP used to do a 5 and 8 
itx board rack mount a while ago but having a quick look I couldn't find 
them on their site anymore.

> What I'm doing is prototyping a cluster which is quiet enough to sit in 
> the
> living room and not be heard over a ceiling fan(!), yet be powerful enough 
> to
> justify itself to videophiles (like myself) as an encoding cluster without
> the associated humungous power bill. such as you'd get with one P4 running
> 24/7*. I'll also be looking into an opensource software solution for 
> cluster
> control and applications porting as well, eventually.

Are you sure they are going to be powerful enough? I have one of the quad 
800Mhz itx rack mounts from linitx.com and to be honest I didn't find them 
that powerful.

ChrisB.