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@xxxxxxxx> 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. > > _______________________________________________ > Linux-audio-user mailing list > Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user > _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
