Here's a multi poll for you all.

First off what type of carputer did you go with? Did you make it yourself, or did you go with a pre-fab setup? Did you go with a fanless motherboard or not? (if you went with fanless, how hot do they get?)

Second, where did you locate your carputer? I've seen people put them in the glove box, some in the wheel well, and one even under the driver's seat (though that looks like it would be very complicated). What are some of the pros/cons of the places you put them? How do you handle the heat disipation? What about computer noise (fan, drives spinning up, etc)?

 

I've done both a mATX motherboard with regular athlon and nForce 2 chipset powered by an OPUS 150 as well as a VIA m12k. Both were just velcroed in the trunk. Both were probably around the same price when all was said and done.

The mATX was faster in every respect from resuming from hibernate to running programs, however, it was larger and got much hotter. I had to replace the stock fan on it with a loud high-rpm one for real hot days, but it was still only audible from inside the car when I wasn't playing music.

The m12k is much slower, but its still usable. The only things that are noticibly slower to the point of affecting usability for me is when recording XM radio, the encoding process will take up a bit of CPU and make it sluggish when doing other things also routing for navigation can take a while, it leaves something to be desired, but its not a bad for a carputer. It also just doesn't overheat. Its been in the trunk on +90 degree days and ive been torture testing it running it without a case fan to see if I can get it to lock up and its been running great so far. It also consumes alot less power and will have no problems surviving crank. The mATX would lock up about half the time on crank if it was already on and in windows, this has a lot to do with the poor status of my battery too though. Finally the m12k is smaller and has small cases. A mATX motherboard isn't much bigger itself, but there just aren't cases that tightly pack things like ITX ones so your stuck with something thats at least twice as big as the smallest ITX case when all is said and done.

If you don't mind working through a few extra issues and are going to be trunk mounting it, I would say go mATX, otherwise go with a VIA.

For the best of both worlds, you can go with a pentium M based motherboard, but they do get very expensive. I'll probably be testing one of these soon myself: http://www.mp3car.com/store/index.php?cPath=46

 

Yah, I saw some of the stuff on mp3car.com. I really like the looks of the "Ampie" case: http://www.mp3car.com/store/product_...roducts_id=123

What I think is funny though is when you go to that link it says that it's $394. But if you click on "Add to Cart" with the selection boxes at their defaults, your total comes out to $2064.00. It's nice of them to put the cheap options as the defaults

 

I put together my own P4 mini-ITX powered by an OPUS 150W power supply - there's a post on it in a thread very similar to this one (search for carputer or carPC). It's basically 8" x 8" x 5" box open on 2 sides to allow air flow (back to front).

It requires fan cooling as does the ATI graphics chip (9100 Mobility Radeon) though that chip did not come with a fan. I also had to install a 120 mm fan in the "exhaust" port on the passenger side rear wheel well, which is where I put the PC to keep the temps down in the hot summer (still reach about 65 C on that ATI chip, usually only 60 C on the P4 even on 90+ degree F days). If the car is off, you can hear the soft hum of the fans, otherwise you can't - so the fan noise has never been a big issue.

I wanted it completely hidden - my trunk looks stock (except for the basslink sitting there). If you remove the carpet, then you can see my AMP, equalizer, carPC, XM Direct box, Power center (to drive multiple regulated 12 V devices off of a relay) and cable distribution blocks (for +14V and ground) - oh yeah and the spare still fits in there. There's ALOT of wires running to the PC and while they are nicely tied together, I did not want those to show.

 

Mine is based on the VIA EPIA CL10000 Motherboard (very simular to God_of_CPU's M12k board) got it from SolarPC.com. It's not as quick as the newer AMD's and P4's out in the market now, but it does run much cooler and requires less electricity to run it. You can also get a DC to DC power supply with it so you can splice it directly into one of the cigarette lighters to power the computer directly so that's a plus.

As for where it's located, it's in the trunk of my car. I'd figured having it in the trunk means it's easier for me to get access of it if i need to change any parts in it and also easier for me to load dvd's into it if i want to watch a dvd in my car

 

I been messing around with a mirco atx case....fits perfectly in the arm rest. I'm just waiting on a few parts before i start ripping my interior apart for this carputer/stero install.

 

Isn't Fry's having sales of mobo/cpu combos? I've seen a AMD64 3000 Winchester core/Via Chipset mATX motherboard combo for $150. That should be strong enough?

 

Your really don't want something that powerful for a carputer. It can be done, but it will be a struggle to power it, keep it cool, and find a spot to put it. You'll have a much easier time if you just go with a mobile athlon processor. The VIA ITX's are even easier to install and keep running stably. Yes, they are slow as hell compared to a new athlon, but I barely notice when I'm driving. They run on less then 60 watts, are damn near impossible to get to overheat, and pretty small.

 

Well the Winchesters dont consume too much power (compared to P4's), and the Venice cores even less. But the $150 for combo is a pretty good price. If you get a VIA ITX can you play back divx/xvid files without any notice of lag? I already have a Mobile Barton 2500 (albeit overclocked to 2.6 ghz & voltage increases) in one of my older rigs, do you know of any passive cooling solutions (no fans) to cool it?

 

My P4 ITX board had all sorts of issues with overheating (both the CPU and the integrated Radeon 9100 GPU) till I actually put a 12 cm pan to exhaust hot air out of the trunk (out the side vents at the rear).

Today it was 100 degrees F in the sun and the carputer temp was a steady 69 degrees C for the GPU and 62 degrees C for the P4 according to the on board monitoring chip. No crashes or instability till I pass 75 C, which used to happen all the time. That's HOT!!!

It is VERY quick though - gotta say - no issues with performance (2.4 GHz - got the Northwood core). I can actually play 3D games at reasonable framerates at 640 x 480. Nothing beats playing F1 while waiting for the spouse to come out of the mall or grocery store - keeps the kids mesmerized too.

 

I would stay away from passive cooling on a mobile athlon, in the car you might be able to deal with just the processor heat with a passive solution, but it will probably do very poorly when you combine that with it being in the trunk on hot days where the ambient temperature will be over 100 degrees.

The VIA ITX can play back divx/xvid fine. The new SP13000 is particularly good at this and what I'm using now. It has a much upgraded 3D card and does much better at multimedia tasks.

 

I'm running a 800mhz setup with ample memory and it is just fine for my uses. During my planning, there were a few deciding factors......size, heat, noise, durability, power consumption,costs and what applications will be ran. . If you are not doing 3d gaming, video editing, photoshoping..etc in your car, you don't need to get a gamer/home-pc setup. If you do those things in your car....well...... you have issues that are beyond this forums help!

That being said.. figure out your priorities and uses for the carpc....then build. You will love any carpc setup that you put in there.

 

I'm using a P3 1Ghz on a mATX board with an ITPS 200W PS. It's designed for a ITX board but works with my board and CPU as well. I have a Xenarc 7" touch screen up front with the computer mounted in a custome wood/carpet box in the trunk. The box has 3 80mm fans that run a 7 volts on one side of the box with the other side open. This pulls air over everything in the box and running at 7 volts keeps them quiet. My next step is to rebuild the box so everything fits on the right side of the trunk behind a hidden panel.