via c7 cpu

Why not just get a turion? They start at $160, and great s754 mobos can be had for <$100.. Talk about low cost power, without much power.

^^ What Endyen said :wink:

It's not about VIA CPU's. It is their flaky chip-sets that have been plaguing us for so long time.

I think the big deal is that these alternate CPU's like via and Cyrix that still exist are able to run very very low power and not require fans / heatsincs for creating quiet devices or small devices.

they're far from powerfull, in fact they usually max out around 1ghz without a lot of the more recent extensions in the CPU. but some cool projects can be done using them and Mini-ATX or Nano-ATX

http://www.mini-itx.com/

I don't know much about VIA CPU's, I was only saying that it's their chip-sets that suck.

I've found Via has a nasty habit of telling people about their projects at least a year or sometimes 2 years before they are REASONABLY availible. Via processors are extremely uncommon to begin with. At this time, I believe all you will find are some C3s and Edens. A lot of the better configurations come from CPU on-board highly integrated Mini-itx mobos (a good deal smaller than MicroATX). As they mentioned here, the C3s and Edens both usually top off near or around 1Ghz (I've seen 1.3Ghz at the highest). Also remember these things are absurdly slow, even given their purpose. You should concider a 1Ghz C3 the equal of a 600Mhz Celeron. This may not be a bad thing though. It's enough to run Windows XP with some tweaking for general speedup.

That said, don't expect to get ahold of the C7 or C7-M anytime soon. With Via, you don't even know if it will hit market at all! I know how long I waited for the official release of the Eden (fanless) CPU. Via really does announce things way too early least for the end-user).

The only serios trouble you may not like has been hinted at by the rest of the crew here. Via chipsets suck. They are extremely low performance, and have broken drivers, and a few of the integrated components just don't quite work the way they should. Via CPUs are tied to Via chipsets. This would pose a problem for me. I'd rather pay more for a Pentium M or Celeron M based unit from Aopen. They have some mobos designed to use these awesome laptop CPUs, and the chipsets for those CPUs are great. Mind you, they are expensive too.

No, their CPUs suck too. They perform far below an Intel P3 of equal speed, especially when it comes to flops.

If you want a fanless miniature system that isn't mising any features of a PC and can run full a blown OS, then there's not much else to go with. But if you have the money and space, I'd suggest using laptop components and an ultra low voltage mobile Celeron.

Do you happen to know the IPC/Watt of Cyrix compared to Turion e.q. ?

  As if CPUs had nice clean IPC numbers. :mrgreen:

But last I knew...
Cyrix/VIA are in a low-end class (almost) by themselves. There's Transmeta too. Their IPC sucks. Their clock is slow. But they put out low W. Go with a low enough clock speed and you can run them totally fanless.

AMD and Intel's mobile chips are much higher end. Their IPC is way better, their clocks are way better, but their W is designed for active cooling, even if with small HSF, pipes, whatever.

The only real exception to this that I know of from the Intel/AMD camp is the Ultra Low Voltage Mobile Celeron from Intel. It's expensive as hell (for its speed) but has Intel's good IPC. It's clock is typically down at (or well below) the Cyrix/VIA level, but with it's good IPC performs equally to the higher clocked PoS. But best of all it's W is very low and you can put it in a dependable platform.

However, theoretically, you might be able to underclock and undervolt a normal AMD/Intel mobile chip to run fanless too.

To be perfectly honest, I'd like to know a lot more in detail about all of the above. I haven't quite uncovered the right source to look for good information on these things yet. If anyone could point me in the right direction...

I know already that much, Mr. Pumpkin Bottom.

Last I heard, the via cpu was built by cypress semiconductor. The ones I've seen are only available as a package with motherboard, and you don't save much over a sempron combo. The sempron can utilize the "cool and quiet" software program that works with any amd approved board. It automatically lowers the voltage and speed to save energy and run the cpu fan at a lower speed. It works so well that on my socket 754 2800 athlon 64, the heatsink fan runs at 0 rpm about 80% of the time. I use a zalman fan mate 2 to manually lower the rpms. The cpu runs at about 1.0 volts and 1000 hertz with cool and quiet enabled, saving energy.

exactly and the new c7 is supposed to run at >2.0 Ghz the mini-itx would be perfect for what i want. A dvd player with a windows or linux gui/os in my truck. I need the low power and low heat (and no moving parts except maybe a harddrive but i may just use a flash drive cause read/seek speeds will not be imperitive.(cd/dvd players can take plenty of abuse esp the slot loading ones.)

thanks,
Clueless

Transmeta ruled the C3. A 1GHz VIA CPU provides less performance than a K6-3 450. And the K6-3 was no king either!

Better to get an ultra-low-voltage Celeron 600. Really! You can run ULV Tualatin Celerons with passive cooling too!

Or better still, just get an XP-M and set it to 6x133 and 1.1v. 800MHz and probably twice the performance of the C3 1000, to be cooled passively.