Hugo Mills wrote:
>>
>> Does anyone have any ojective information on the relative merits of a
>> new 60W ITX over keeping the old slow machines?
>>
>
> Pretty much any EPIA-based machine will be far faster than either
> of those two, and will draw considerably less power (and will have
> power saving features in it, too, for those times when it doesn't need
> the CPU speed).
>
>
>> Does anyone know if these machines will now cope with the likely loads
>> of modern mail filtering (the present machine is a 560MHz AMD and is
>> sometimes brought to its knees, but then it _is_ also running X and
>> usually has a least firefox open).
>>
>
> My parents have a "fanless"(*) 600MHz EPIA system. That runs
> mailscanner, and handles several hundred mails a day, mostly spam,
> without a problem that anyone's noticed.
>
> Hugo.
>
> (*) Fanless CPU; the case still needs a 60mm fan to cool it.
>
>
I looked at buying a fanless 1GHz Epia mobo to replace my 500MHz one
which was coping with mail and file serving, but needed more oomph for
some of the other thngs I wanted to do. Listening to the racket coming
from my 'quiet' cases housing a 2.66GHz Celeron I wish I had now, but
other things came into play that dictated I went this route.
One thing I did consider with the Epia boards was going for an external
power supply (laptop style) to replace the internal one with its fan.
When I was running the Epia 5000 (headless, so no gui), it rarely struggled.
Sean