HD video is very much in demand for products that are small and have low prices. This is what makes the netbooks and nettop flooding the market so popular today. VIA has announced its latest pico-ITX board for very small form factor devices that can still support playback of full 1080p video over HDMI.
Autonomous, intelligent robots are great, but when they look like classic Transformers characters they’re even better. The handiwork of Mellon University’s Tekkotsu lab, the Chiara Robot has six independent legs, a claw arm with six degrees of freedom, and a combination of webcam and IR rangefinder for spotting objects and obstacles. Even better, this is no simple lab project: the Chiara Robot will actually be manufactured and sold by RoPro Design.
Video demos after the cut
VIA have announced an HD-capable expansion board for their EPIA-P710 Pico-ITXe board. The VIA P710-HD uses an S3 Graphics 4300E video processor and allows for dual DVI, HDMI and S-Video, multiple displays and above-1080p resolution support.
Bring-your-own-drive backup is nothing new, but it’s rare to find a full PC lurking inside. That’s where VIA’s ARTiGO A2000 steps up; having dropped in a 1.5GHz C7-D processor and twin SATA-II 3GB/s support, VIA are offering the NAS form-factor with enough grunt to run Vista, should you be so inclined. SlashGear set out to discover whether the A2000 is an ambitious success, or simply bites off more than it can chew.
VIA Technologies today announced the Via ARTiGo A2000 barebone storage mini-server. The ARTiGo A2000 boast large storage space in a very stylish, compact, low power and low noise system. With all the media we download to our PCs these days, it is nice to have somewhere to store all of it so that the primary memory is not all taken up.
Casemods follow a pretty simple equation: take a non-standard, preferably unusual container, add PC components, and voilà. Of course, then the interest comes from fitting a PC where previously it simply wouldn’t fit. Enter modder Unravelled, and his Sinclair ZX81 casemod: a VIA EPIA Pico-ITX based computer stuffed inside this compact chunk of 80s memorabilia.
VIA have taken the wraps off of their first Mini-ITX board to use the company’s Nano processor, the replacement to the low-power C7-M. The VIA VB8001 board features the 1.6GHz processor itself, support for up to 4GB of DDR2 RAM, gigabit ethernet and two SATA ports. There’s also a mini-PC slot for adding wireless broadband cards.
VIA have done a little extra shaving and come up with their latest Pico-ITX motherboard, the EPIA P700. By replacing the traditional ports with in-line I/O header pins, there’s been enough room for VIA to include an integrated power adaptor, while still keeping the whole thing down to just 10cm x 7.2cm. Accessory boards add normal ports, or you can simply wire up whichever connections you need.
VIA has dropped its already-compact Pico-ITX boards into a hot wash and come up with the PX5000EG, measuring in at just 3.9 x 2.8-inches. The small size is due to VIA dropping the processor speed down to just 500MHz (compared to the existing 1GHz PX1000G) and thus being able to leave off any active cooling. It’ll still support up to 1GB of RAM, though, and has hardware MPEG-2/-4 and WMV9 hardware decoding acceleration.
We wrote about the Pico-ITX form-factor back in January, calling Via’s 100 x 72mm motherboard “the new standard” in micro computing; well, the first design to hit the shelves is the EPIA PX10000G, complete with a 1GHz C7 CPU and support for up to 1GB of SDRAM.
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