[geeks] Mini-ITX cases/systems/vendors

[Joshua Boyd]

On Wed, 28 Jul 2004 17:05:35 -0500, Bill Bradford <mrbill at mrbill.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 28, 2004 at 09:17:24PM +0000, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> > What about these "XPC" barebones systems - they are without CD, HD, RAM, or CPU, but are priced from $180-200 + S/H from tigerdirect.com...
> > http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?CatId=1210
> 
> That's similar to what I just built for Amy a couple of days ago:
> 
> http://www.mrbill.net/box
> 
> e-Cube barebones case, Celeron 2.4Ghz CPU, 256M PC2700 DDR RAM, a 40G HD
> I had lying around, $20 SBLive! sound card (she didn't like the onboard
> sound), and a $39 (!) 52x CD-R/16X DVD-ROM.  All together, was around $400.

Is that a CRT on her desk?  I thought you'd upgraded everything to LCD
awhile back.

Just out of curiosity, did the onboard sound have S/PDIF out?  Has she
ever considered using a headphone amp with S/PDIF in?  Sure, it wouldn't
be quite a cheap, but it might be nicer still.

Here at work I have two computers with SB Live cards in them next to my
desk.  I get better sound going from the S/PDIF out to a outboard D to A
to a cheap set of HarmanKardon Dell Crap speakers then I do going from
the soundcards analog out to the same speakers.  Substitute headphones
for the cheap speakers, and the quality is still noticable better.

The big difference is that on analog out from the SB Live, there was a
noise/hum, that you could hear changing pitch with changing CPU/disk
loads.  The external DAC doesn't have that problem.

Any in case you are wondering, I'm not using a very high quality DA.
It's a pretty cheap one made for monitoring signals (not professionally 
monitoring it for quality, just monitoring it to make sure it is there
and the right thing).  It's just all I had on hand.