been waiting since may for my screen, it came broken, I stupidly didnt test it fully before removing the case. then sent it back, and have been waiting since april for them to fix it. they slowly told me they wont fix it under warrenty cause the case was open, and now they are charging me 150$ to replace the touch screen. greed bastards...



but now I just have to give them another 150(total of 700$ for this damn screen) and I get the screen in 2 weeks. the damn computer only cost 500$.

but itll be cool to finally have it, its like the mod that I forget I even paid for and I wonder, where did that 1200$ go? oh yeah that thing that I have nothing to show for it.

not for long...

sorry, this is a pointless post, just excited to hopefully finally join the car PC club.

 

how do you do this? is it a touchscreen monitor? Does the computer power on when the car does or power off when the car does?

 

Mine does. I believe Ares' will too. Mine has an Opus "smart" power supply. PM Chazz and he'll tell you all about it. He is the guy who put my PC together.

 

yes mine will but in a different way. mine is a custom built computer with a custom built box, all done by myself.

its a full size ATX board with the works, 1.6ghz athlon XP, gforce 4, 512mb, the works, and it has the full 4 PCI slots of a desktop PC.

down side is that it would never run on the power that the opus can supply, and I cant dream of affording 2 of them. so I am using an inverter to a 300w PSU(maybe one day Ill get a tripplite PSU, but theyre $$$$). along with that is a time delay relay which will turn power on when the car turns on, and it will turn it off 5 minutes after the car turns off. Down side is that it doesnt shut the computer down the right way, just cuts the power.

 

OPUS.. where can I get the 150 watt opus DC-DC PSU? can it power a p4? (2.4 GHz, C)

I emailed Opus, and they replied with a 4-6 week lead time

 

no it cant power it, youd need atleast 2 of them.(at the time they were like 200$ a peice I thought, 400 for PSU was out of my range) alot of times youll find desktops running even 400 and 450watts. 450 is standard on high end computers, 300 is sorta the average.

inverters can have their perks, one being that mine will cut power if the incoming current drops under 9.6, as well as a warning beep at 10.5 this means I cant leave the computer on too long and kill the battery. also a built in fuse, and some other stuff requires AC, such as a USB hub if you plan on using USB devices that require power.

 

ares, I was thinking of buying one of those little shuttle cube pc's. The PSU in those is a 200 Watt unit. I was thinking that 150 watt's should be enough to power the Motherboard, P4 (they don't use that much power, and the hard disk. I don't see that much else on my PC, besides a GPS unit, and a USB dvd rom.

 

the little cubes are not powering a full unit, they typicly run the same sort of MB as the via/epia thing. very downsized, using laptop HDs, and low temp chips to keep fans to a minimum. full computers make very little attempts to save any sort of energy, hence why desktops are so much faster and cheaper than laptops. and why the epia can not be had any faster than 1ghz.

dvd roms take alot of power, and the fans as well. HDs require power(tho if you use a laptop HD they use less and are smaller), the power gets used in lots of ways. you could try but I dont see any ATX board, P4, fans, hd, dvd, running off 150watts, or even 200 for that matter. might try building the computer, than testing it with an AC unit at 150watts, see how it goes, be sure to put a load on it tho. better to spend 20$ on a PSU and find out it doesnt work than 200, wait a month, and then try and get rid of that.

 

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduc...ription=SB61G2

The PSU says 200 W

 

you will need an inverter for that. opus psu is dc to dc, that psu at newegg looks like the same for a desktop model (bout $30 at any computer store) which is ac to dc. so you'll need to have an inverter to convert the car's dc to ac.

 

Ah, yes, but I was going to take out the AC/DC PSU and try to fit in the DC/DC PSU or mount it another way and use that to power the machine, rather than using an inverter.

I was thinking since it is 200watt, and some people (well most with that system) would be using a top of the line AGP video card which uses a ton of power, 150 watt's (from OPus's psu) should be more than enough to power it.

 

I havent seen anyone using anything other than built in graphics cards, even I am using an Nforce MOBO which is just a mobo whos onboard graphics is a gforce 4 440MX. not anything too serious, but better than average. the perk of the board is that it does have an 8x AGP slot, which is a rarity, but I have no intentions of using it.

Im not sure what you mean by putting an ac/dc suppy into a dc/dc supply... it cant be done. perhaps Im just not understanding your idea correctly tho, give more details on it.

a full out graphic card is what sets the difference between 450 and 300. and the laptop hd, small sized mobo with low power processor and laptop dvd player is what sets the 200 from the 300.