Mini-ITX gameing?

Ait'al · 2012-09-11, 06:24 PM

was surfing around newegg and looking at ssd and ended up on zotacs site to look at their version of something. I found these and wondered if any can play games succesfully. Could you put together a 200-300 dollar mini-rig for multimedia and gaming and spruce it up with decals or something to be a PS1-2/swtor/wow gaming machine? Once has an extra x16 slot I wonder if you could duel card and get enough oomph to run games cheap. Could make a nice small machine for travel or for small machine.

I wonder if you could get one to go with that other thread I had with tablet machines and make a mini machine with a tablet for a monitor for gaming. It does come with wifi. especially if you could get the tablet to split the graphics processing in a usable way. Or even multiple tablets or something cool. One would be good also.

Anyway the question was originally how would these work for games out of curiosity? could they run any games today. Many games now aren't the highest graphics in the world and if you only want to play them you could save a lot of money potentially even get a cheap ssd and not have to worry about large space or costs etc.

Maybe some poeple trying to get planetside 2 who also play less graphics intense games could at least get it on low setting or maybe better and play using theses.

Main product page Zotac!

Comparison sheet if it will let me link it!

Goku · 2012-09-11, 06:46 PM

While there is mini-ITX builds out there that motherboard won't run anything. Atom is a slow processor and that GPU onboard is quite old now too. If you really want a small build to bring around with that form factor expect to spend $500-$1000 depending on what you want.

Rbstr · 2012-09-11, 07:23 PM

A small form factor gaming machine is going to cost as much, if not more than a similarly-specified large PC.
An the higher end AMD APUs and Intel Ivy Bridge chips with the better integrated graphics (HD 4000) can make a stab at super-cheap stuff.

"Sharing" the rendering capability between systems is doable...but you're not going to just get it to work on your own with some easy software.
OnLive [s]does[/s] did it

Vancha · 2012-09-12, 04:03 AM

http://www.zotacusa.com/products/mot...form_factor=27

That's the page you need to look at for making a gaming itx rig, though for a rig with some serious oomph you'd be looking at...

This (Zotac)
This (ASRock)
This (Asus)
This (MSI)
This (Gigabyte)
And soon, this (EVGA)

I believe the ASRock is looked upon the most favourably of all of them, though the EVGA might give it a run for it's money if it's not too expensive.

Ait'al · 2012-09-12, 09:20 AM

RBSTR

"Sharing" the rendering capability between systems is doable...but you're not going to just get it to work on your own with some easy software.

That's a pitty. Think how cool gaming could be if you could take a mini ITX with you and use a little tablet computer for gaming sessions. You could hook them together for more proccessing if you have two or add two cards in the machine and offload the graphics. 8) That would be an amazing system.

I wonder if I put this idea up on the ubuntu forums if anyone would want to work on it. 8p linux mini gaming machines!! 8o..

Rbstr · 2012-09-12, 09:43 AM

Why would I want to burn all that money when I could get a decent computer and play it on a monitor or TV?

Buy a WiiU if you want to do the secondary screen thing.

Goku · 2012-09-12, 09:43 AM

I wouldn't ever expect a tablet to be able to do some kind of co processing for games anyway or other software. Keep in mind the processor/gpu on those tablets still aren't the strongest out there. I think the GPU used in the Tegra 3 is based on the same tech in the GPUs used by Nvidia in the 6800 series, which were released 8 years ago. These GPUs can't even come close to run modern day PC games. Even if they could help in processing I wouldn't expect much of any boost just due to how weak they are even compared to Intel iGPU found in SB/IB...

Ait'al · 2012-09-12, 10:04 AM

I'm also partly thinking of in concept. Not necessarily with this hardware. I was just curious how powerful these were specifically. I'm not familiar with any of the stuff in the specs. Software wise though it would be cool. if you got the ball rolling maybe the hardware companies would work on it. then maybe they would be at one point be cost efficient. Some games are around a decade or more. You can play some stuff with older hardware for a long time. so it's not infeasible someone could use a machine like this for certain gaming. And some people would stick to those games.(WoW for instance or SW:TOR or the previous mmo Galaxies) I also brought it up incase they were and people could use them now. Especially since they were only 300 dollars. Even if they could play medium to low settings some people might like them if the hardware was good enough. I though maybe they strapped good GPUs with basic CPU/ram so they could play decently or something. Could make good starter machines.

You never know a market could grow for them too. And that fact they are small and portable would make it better. If you could make the machines work together too and have like 3 mini ITX splitting processing and the hand devices it might work out(you could get cases with ports to hook together on the side as datapaths). You could have a 5 person gaming session with 3 machines and 5 tablets or something. It's not impossible. Could be convenient for people who want to get together for small gaming stuff in their homes. they could even make cases that let you hook them together to split processing and let you change and upgrade and be desktops. It could be a good concept. And it could make competition to console gaming. a full desktop could beat a console pretty quick with the dignity of a full desktop OS and features. add in power plugs in the front for the tablets if you want and the option of wired and wireless and it could be a good idea.

And the tablet could still be split to be able to run one part of the graphics or another. Even if it's just the smaller stuff like the GUI for the game or something. or a small part of the physics. You could let the software let you chose what to run based on your specs and what it could run. Then dump the rest on the CPU CPUs of the mini machines.

If you just get the software going the hardware companies may follow. Especially if you come up with good stuff to run the graphics splitting or give an idea of what the hardware should do in scope. The imagination can lead to a lot of good engineering designs. Having the idea and criteria for the machine can give a lot to attempt to build one. Criteria is important. 8p