PC in xbox case

[bigkidoz]

I picked up an ugly little HP E-pc thingy that has a Celeron CPU on a micro atx size mobo and an external psu, thinking i might stick it in an xbox case and stick ubuntu with xbmc on it ?
I have 1gig ram to throw in it and a couple of spare IDE hdd's and might see if the CD rom can be squeezed in as well, will Ubunto run ok on a 1.2 Celeron and 1 gig ram ?

[Geeba]

Your almost double minimum requirements....

700mhz and 512mb RAM

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Insta ... quirements

[Heimdall]

You might want to see if the CPU can be upgraded to a proper one - IME Celeron's are worse than useless, and if the motherboard will support it then the proper Pentium equivalent for a machine that age should cost next to nothing, but will have a huge impact on usability. If it's the E-PC 40 then a 1.2 GHz Pentium III should work.

[bigkidoz]

Thats the beast, ugly little beige effer, i'll pull it apart and check the mobo details . I should be able to get a PIII pretty easily , i dont expect it to play full HD BD rips but it cant be worse than the xbox 700mhz .

[Heimdall]

but it cant be worse than the xbox 700mhz .

I wouldn't put money on that, especially with the Celeron! The Xbox runs a single task (possibly even single threaded?), with any apparent multitasking being handled by highly optimised game engines (or for XBMC, highly optimised video decoders). Your PC runs a general purpose multi-tasking OS, so spends chunks of its time just context switching and keeping track of the status of all of the tasks it is managing (even with some form of pre-emption), some of which will be sub-optimal resource hogs, even with Ubuntu.

For example, if I run Ubuntu 12.04LTS System Monitor on my 32 bit single core 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 machine (with 2 GB RAM), it uses 40% of the CPU time. If the same is true for your system with an upgraded 1.2GHz P III, then 40% of 1.2GHz is ~500 MHz, leaving you with 700MHz to run any other tasks you might want to actually use. In other words, with one task running what's left is about the same as an Xbox. I accept that System Monitor might be a bad example, but you get the picture....

Having said all of that, I'd still do it, just to see what happens! The £10 it will cost for the CPU is less than the cost of a pint and a takeaway, and hence it's a cheap evening's entertainment.

[bigkidoz]

It was due for the skip so even if i do buy a PIII its cost me next to nothing as you said and it will be interesting to see how it performs or doesn't how ever the case may be.

[asbo]

I used to run xbmc on a crappy old Dell with the first Pentium 4 (pre socket 775), I can't remember the clock speed or anything but there was only 512mb or maybe even 256mb of ram. This was running the xbmc live cd installed onto the HDD, so I think unbuntu underneath.
It worked OK, but this was a few years (3-ish?) ago. So who knows about Eden etc.
I built a proper media PC to replace it and now the old Dell sits in the corner as the emergency xboxhdm PC as it runs that quite well

[Heimdall]

...the old Dell sits in the corner as the emergency xboxhdm PC as it runs that quite well

Snap! Mine (the 3.06GHz P4) is a Compaq, and I only keep it for xboxhdm, or anything else that needs an IDE interface! Fortunately it's SFF, so doesn't take up too much room.

[asbo]

Mine isn't even in a case, its just the motherboard etc. screwed to a bit of chipboard
It gathers quite a lot of dust under my chest of draws but surprisingly always powers up when needed

[Geeba]

Hmmm I had bin loads (well probably 15 - 20 ish) PIII Tualatins kicking about before we moved... the fastest PIII made 1.4Ghz 512kb cache and 133Mhz FSB - kicked the early P4's ass!!

If they turn up your welcome to one.... not sure what postage would be thou...

[bigkidoz]

Hmmm I had bin loads (well probably 15 - 20 ish) PIII Tualatins kicking about before we moved... the fastest PIII made 1.4Ghz 512kb cache and 133Mhz FSB - kicked the early P4's ass!!

If they turn up your welcome to one.... not sure what postage would be thou...

Actually for small items postage is pretty good , i have bought a few things from the UK and some only take 3 days.
I fired it up last night and found the hdd has win7 on it, the poor Celeron 1ghz struggles and the 1gig ram is only recognized as 512mb but at least it runs. I had a few different flavour linux discs floating around but i must have turfed them out , will download a newer version anyway.

[bigkidoz]

Side by side you see that the pc will easily fit inside the xbox case , may even be able to squeeze the psu in as well.

Looks can be deceiving as they say , mobo is just a bit too long to fit in the case without majorly butchering it.
It will fit sideways but then that will place all the I/O ports on one side which is not ideal and i dont want to stuff around re wiring them to locate them at the rear - will have to look for either a mini/micro ATX or a SFF that will fit.

[bigkidoz]

So it wont fit the xbox case but i was given a P III 1ghz cpu but even after a lot of online searching , i cant find how to the change the bus speed to 133 to support the cpu.
The HP bios setup is very limited and there are only 3 dip switches not related to bus speed adjustment.

[professor_jonny]

So it wont fit the xbox case but i was given a P III 1ghz cpu but even after a lot of online searching , i cant find how to the change the bus speed to 133 to support the cpu.
The HP bios setup is very limited and there are only 3 dip switches not related to bus speed adjustment.

many hp mother boards are rebranded from other manufactures such as jetway, asus, and msi which are some of the common ones and often you can cross flash another bios to it ,it is not something i would reccomend doing on your new computer as you might end up with a brick but if you recovered it from a skip you could soft boot a bios and see if it is suitable before you flash it.

it might then give you more setup options.

there is also bios modding where you patch in the cpu micro code to the bois to support the chip but again not something i would recomend attempting on your new pc.

I have done it to an acer aspire 1700 (my current media sff pc) and a few old pavilions one being my work pc a pavilion210a (yes my work pc is a p4) i had to do it to support wake on lan so i could log in to work from home and it boot up when i need it to.