[bobdole369]

I just set up this mini-box (m350) case with PICO PSU for a project at work. Used a Zotac 7100 and I was just thinking about exactly that - how awesome a car CPU it might make with a better board. We are going to use it onboard a boat monitoring screen, but if one of these come with an optical out - especially if one of these mini-itx's comes with one of the Dolby functions (Dolby Home Theater - where the sound stuff actually encodes into surround) there is no reason to have any other sound card besides the onboard stuff. Well there are still better sounding analog cards I'm sure. The analog side of ALC889A (one of the decent HD audio onboard sound cards) has a very nice on-paper spec sheet, but I have yet to actually hear one put to some nice equipment.

It's been a while since I looked at it, but one thing I remember is how it beneficial it seemed to have hardware based DSP, to free up processing power for other tasks and also might offer better SQ. I'll take a look around and see what kind of new technology and software is out there now.

CPU power and memory are very cheap. With onboard sound it's easy to do a lot of effects in software now.

Have you guys tried the 'rugged' harddrives on mp3car?

Solid state drives are cheap and have no rotating parts. Put OS and apps on that.

You never write to them in this application (flash has a lifetime limited number of write cycles). Set it up and let it run, hibernate when the car shuts off to an external hard drive, which holds the media and is easy to put new stuff on.

You don't really get to pick and choose what each CPU does.

You can make that happen (affinity) but you don't want to - the CPU does pretty well. I've only had to use it to play simcity 4 (doesn't like running on 4 cpus)

But what happens when you add another video screen running engine diagnostics, play video on the main one, run GPS and bluetooth at the same time?

Engine diags are at their heart just serial data, sometimes with scaling and maybe some math. Quite simple to display, but that depends on the app you are running, might need cpu or graphics. Our boat stuff does some very good gauges and graphics, and uses a good amount of cpu, but not much help from the graphics card. GPS and bluetooth are the same thing too just serial data, if you have a map displayed that takes some CPU and a decent bit of RAM, but look how well even google maps works and that takes nothing. HD video is hard to display right with a slow cpu though. That might be worth another box dedicated to video.

I know my laptop is a dual 64 bit AMD 2.2GHZ and 4 gb of ram and when I use two screens it takes a serious amount of processing.

Don't want to start a cpu war, but boss uses a quad 2.4ghz intel and runs 4 screens + HDMI to a 42" LCD. And actually uses all 4 productively and its not slow (autocad and sketchup and solidworks). Runs out of RAM in xp 32bit more often.

I want dual motherboards.

2 really small computers perhaps?

TA, Xovers, EQ minimum, time correction and phase correct filters definitely nice?

With Dolby certified boards - TA, EQ, TC are in teh software and done in the sound card. Lots of ways to do it in the player software too. It's a big deal and it works.

I'd really like to find a way (I'm sure it exists, probably costs) to turn all 6 outputs on a 6channel out into crossed over stereo pairs (sub, rear, front mb, front mr, front hi, center).