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Would make an excellent laptop as well - no fans, just passively cooled. Dump the cd/dvd drive as well, and you'll have an ultra-flat, ultralight laptop which can be used for like 10 hours straight.
I guess it depends on what you use your laptop for me - if you use it as a 'mobile computer' but your primary machine is a desktop, then I could understand. VIA would be great for those who want an ultra-portable device. Then again, it would cool to see a UltraSPARC IIe in an affordable mobile device.
For me, I got rid of my desktop over a year ago, and now use my laptop for everything - so for me, its a must that it has alot of grunt. The Core 2 is excellent for what it can do with so little power; the new VIA processor (64bit) will be interesting to see how Solaris runs on it - that being my primary platform.
superstoned:
There are not many fanless VIA CPUs available. When
that big myth started a few years ago there was only
one fanless board available; EPIA 5000, 533 MHz. 533
very slow MHz which equaled to somewhere around P2
266 MHz.. The 800 MHz version had a noisy 40 mm fan.
They also have a pretty fat heatsink, much thicker than
any laptop you can purchase today.
That's why temperature-controlled CPU fans are totally
necessary in every new laptop.
Jos van den Oever has a DELL laptop with a passively cooled 1.2 ghz Celeron, so it's possible to have no CPU fan AND decent performance already. And have a look at this page, VIA's proc's up to 1.5 ghz run fanless: http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/ultra_mobile/ultra_mobile.jsp




Member since:
2005-07-07
Of course. But for normal desktop work, it's good enough. I own a laptop with a P3 800 mhz, and that's plenty - the 256 mb ram is clearly the limiting factor. Of course, Via has to ensure their 3D drivers are good enough for Compiz/Beryl/whatever like stuff, as I'd want that, but aside from that, I don't worry about performance. And having it all fanless - lovely!
Would make an excellent laptop as well - no fans, just passively cooled. Dump the cd/dvd drive as well, and you'll have an ultra-flat, ultralight laptop which can be used for like 10 hours straight.