[LAU] Box under £400

[Egor Sanin]

If you are not adverse to buying components and building a system, I
can't recommend a fanless cpu/motherboard combo from Intel enough:
Intel Desktop Board D525MW


A little underpowered (1.8 GHz) but fits the RAM spec you noted.  I
have one of these and it's really awesome.  You can get one for under
$100 here in Canada.  You've got a PCI slot, so stick in a firewire
card and you're good to go.  It's also tiny, 170 x 170 mm.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/motherboards/desktop-motherboards/desktop-board-d525mw.html

On 5/30/12, Sciss <contact at sciss.de> wrote:
> hi,
>
> I don't know if this is the best place to ask, as it's more of a hardware
> question...
>
> I will need to get a good + cheap + reliable machine to sound installations.
> I can invest _max_ £400 (EUR 500) and I need to get hold of the machine
> latest by August. Unless a miracle happens and a new Mac Mini model is
> announced, dropping the prices of current models by at least £150, I am
> looking for something comparable of the i5 2.3 GHz Mac Min, Linux based.
>
> It can't be desktop size, it really should be a portable thing, size factor/
> weight not much larger than first gen Mac Mini.
>
> The nettops seem all underpowered for computation expensive realtime apps. I
> came across this : http://www.zotacusa.com/zbox-giga-id72-plus.html -- but
> seems like a new model or so, can't find any retailers or pricing info, at
> least not in the UK.
>
> Minimum specs would be i3 2 GHz, 4 GB RAM, 100 GB HD. Will be audio only, so
> I guess graphics card doesn't matter. And of course, it needs to run Linux
> audio -- my stuff will use SuperCollider and various things on the Java VM.
>
> How about audio interfaces? I guess there is no chance I can connect a MOTU
> 828 Mk II to any of these boxes? The Z-Box looks interesting saying that it
> has 8-channels digital audio output via HDMI. I have no clue how to get that
> to 8 analog line signals, but maybe there is a cheap way? Will there be a
> problem getting Jack to talk to this kind of interface?
>
> Thanks for your suggestions, I hope it's not off topic!
>
> Best,
>
> .h.h.
>
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