Anyone know anything about Mini-ITX setups and/or 802.11

[yossarian]

I'm looking to build a media box for my apartment next year, and the mini-ITX form-factor is really sexy and cheap.

I'm wondering about dixv / dvd performance, though. What's the lowest-end chipset that's cheap and powerful enough to play media?

Also, how well do the USB 802.11b units work? Seems like they'd be really awkwardly slow.

[Case]

I'm looking to build a media box for my apartment next year, and the mini-ITX form-factor is really sexy and cheap.

I'm wondering about dixv / dvd performance, though. What's the lowest-end chipset that's cheap and powerful enough to play media?

Also, how well do the USB 802.11b units work? Seems like they'd be really awkwardly slow.

For single-tasking stuff (playing a DVD movie, acting as a lightweight backup/NAS device), the Via mini-ITX systems work well. If you try to run multiple tasks (even streaming multiple media streams), they bog down.

At least one company is shipping a mini-ITX board with an Intel 845GE chipset that can run a P4 (up to 533MHz FSB). It's limited to cruddy Intel graphics, but if you're just using it to serve up media, that should be okay.

802.11 is terrible for media transmission. 802.11g is merely mediocre, but gets the job done if you're not running too many streams.

[yossarian]

Ok, thanks. I'll look into the higher-clock C3 or whichever it is that's 1ghz or so for the itx, I suppose.

As for 11b, I've got it on my iBook and it streams audio pretty well from my pc; I was more concerned with how the actual USB part works - I was under the impression that USB transfer rates were really slow, so it didn't seem to make any sense for networking.