I just tested out the the 800 because I was gonna build one of these for the house and I can't tell much of a difference between the two except that the M9000 is $60 more...

The 800 seems to run a little cooler too and use less power. Looks like the 800 will go in the car.

Anyone else notice a difference in speed?

 

The thing I like about the 9000 is all the extra connectors it has. I has alot more things built in that could save extra parts being pluged into the board. The other thing I like about it is the on-board hardware MPEG decoder. The decoder would really help when it comes to playing DVDs.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to use the M9000 with 512MB. I think the extra $60 will be well spent.

zaway

 

All I can tell you is get a good power supply. The one that comes in the casetronic 2699R case is a crap shoot. Although I got mine to eventually work properly (initially had a problem booting it up until I went with a laptop harddrive), the power required by the motherboard is too high. I think that motherboard probably needs a power supply of about 65 watts minimum IMO.

 

you are making a good point. Looking at the DC-DC converter I plan on using it only puts out about 60W which is not enough.
Maybe I will end up using the 800 model, I just need to make sure it has the S-Video out and such.

Back to doing some more research.

zaway

 

The 800 has S-video. What LCD are you going with that has S-video? The only thing I've noticed that the 800 Doesn't have is USB 2.0 and Firewire. Video on 800 is 8MB AGP compared to 32 MB AGP on 9000.

Another good thing about the 800 is that PC133 SDRAM is almost free these days.

If you really want the 9000, I'd give it a try especially with that 60 Watt power supply...you can always return it.

 

I'm going with the M9000 and probably the casetronic box that you mentioned (with the accompany DC-DC power supply). I need USB 2.0 and the other items for addtional things I want to run. Hopefully the power supply will be enough (I'm using laptop harddrive and CD/DVD-rom).

I wonder if you can setup another one of those power supplies to run additional items. Another question I had, was what is the maximum length for an IDE cable and still work? Meaning if I wanted to put the DVD-Drive in one of the mail slots and the PC in the sub void, how much length do I have to work with. I've also looked at using an external DVD drive which would require Firewire or USB 2.0 (another reason for M9000) with external power or another DC2DC power supply.

Has anyone thought about putting a Glidepoint (touchpad) in the location where the change tray is? I thinking about mounting one from the bottom, it seems like a great place to put one out of the way.

 

Yeah, I mentioned this in another thread. I don't think you can fit one in unless the touchpad is small enough. even so, you need some custom mod to make it look nice.

 

Actually I think you could even use a trackball, with a custom color matching trim piece on top, so all you see is the little trackball and two buttons......that would look good as well. I'm not a big fan of the touchpad style anyway.