Modding This would make an interesting mod....

Cramming a PC, into a 3.5" hard drive.

Use a Pico-ITX board (picture pulled from geek.com, to avoid deep linking to them)


I wonder what to Pico-ITXs will run when they come out, and I've got a couple dead HDs laying around...

 

I was planning to build a case for a pico itx that is smaller that 3 hdd, but in one would realy be a hard challenge !

 

As long as it doesn't come with a power brick the size of the X360's, that'd be ace taped to the back of a 30" monitor

 

That would be awsome! Get one of those DC-DC powersupplys, use a power brick to plug into the molex. Then i guess you would need to use flash for the HDD.

 

It would be pretty cool to have a modular computer built in the carcasses of hard disks, especialy if you couldnt tell from the outside.

I dont think it will be possible to run a 30" monitor from one of these, all current 30" monitors require dual link DVI and this board has only onboard VGA and miniPCI expansion. Even if you could get a miniPCI-PCI adapter i havent seen a PCI graphics card with dual link DVI.

Moriquendi

 

Well.. Make it a 24 incher then

 

wow that would be interesting, and pretty awesome. Wouldn't it be pretty difficult though to be honest?

 

If you used a DC-DC powersupply and some kind of flash storage i don't think it would be too tough to make it fit.

 

I suppose, if you felt packing it into a 3.5" HD would be a bit too tough, tracking down a big old 5.25" HD (the monsters that filled 2 5.25" bays!) would be a lot easier...

 

it has dvi but you have to use a small dongle type thing to get the plug as there is no room for it on the board just a small pin header

 

The only probleme is that the picoitx is probably as fast a toaster

and Ufos85 build one in two 5.25
http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=129419

 

I think its a 1.0GHz P3 class processor so its not too bad, besides its not designed for high power only small size.

Without dual link it still wont work with a 30".

Moriquendi

 

Via has been getting around cpu limitations through hardware mpeg decoding and other support chips for quite awhile. It should be fine for browsing, watching video, and other lighter tasks.

 

I played GTA3 on a 1GHz epia m10000 for a while, it wasn't as bad as you might imagine, I could get 1024x768 but no eye candy at all.

Moriquendi

 

a board that small is enough eyecandy itself

 

What happens if you plug two different PC's Mini ITX, into one 30" monitor? Also you may be able to go VGA-HDMI with on VGA cord, not sure.

 

i sense the use of a PicoPSU coming on

 

All the current 30" panels have no internal image processing because there isn't currently a chip that can handle the data rate needed to run 2560x1600, this means that (AFAIK) there are no 30" monitors that have any kind of analog input. Also I don't think VGA supports a high enough resolution, youd need something like a reverse TrippleHead2GO to combine the outputs which would give you three separate desktops, you might as well have three separate monitors. I really like the idea, it would be great to have a huge monitor/computer that you could carry around like an artists portfolio but I just don't think the technology is up to it at the moment.

Moriquendi