Thinking of trashing the MII12000 and getting a 2Ghz Celeron

miztahsparklez · 06-21-2006, 04:01 AM

alrighty.. at the moment i have an epia MII.. and ive been contemplating on upgrading to a faster CPU to handle visualizations and perhaps speed up things quite a bit for load times and whatnot on mp3s... im thinking of grabbing the 2ghz celeron system from xenarc. but im unsure of what im buying will be enough of a difference to make it worth while.

what do you guys think? will my mII 1.2ghz be enough for what i want it to do? or will the celeron system do it way better?

What ill be losing by switching:
No PC card slot for my Wifi card...
No PCI for my TV tuner/ Better sound card.
M1-ATX powersupply will have to be junked.
More space in the trunk will be lost for a carnetix 1900...
The cost of the MII
512MB PC2700 ram with heatspreader
5v rail voltage source will have to be found for sound card, usb hubs, etc.

would the built in xenarc power supply be able to supply power to two usb hubs and a creative Audigy2 nx? or what else would i need? would the 5v module from carnetix be enough? could i possibly run a laptop cdrom drive too?

LagunaICE · 06-21-2006, 05:48 AM

too big loss for too minor gain

miztahsparklez · 06-21-2006, 11:26 AM

well the main thing is, if it plays music without a hitch, then its worth it.

miztahsparklez · 06-21-2006, 11:57 AM

also, the one im buying has ram and a hd and all that stuff already in it.. it justneeds a power supply. I dont have a case for my carputer at the moment. its just stuck in a fiberglass mold hotglued using an old motherboard removable tray that i dremeled to make it shorter for the epia board. i was planning to get a case anyway, but this deal is tempting since i get a case with stuff in it. also, my laptop drive just crashed, so it needs to be blasted probably to rebuild.

the carputer will probably be going under the spare tire area, so i wont have to do anything too fancy. or if not there, it will probably just be put in the same area that my carputer sits now.possibly with a plexi window inserted.

JC-S60 · 06-21-2006, 11:59 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by miztahsparklez

well the main thing is, if it plays music without a hitch, then its worth it.

All my mII 12k based machines have played music without a hitch... only when connecting my audigy 2 NX things seemed a bit slower...but music and movies were still ok.

Maybe you should look for another (less cpu-hungry) soundcard? The turtle-beach maybe?

miztahsparklez · 06-21-2006, 06:40 PM

i do like how the sound card sounds though.

the main thing is, the carputers audio skips every once in awhile, my laptop cd drive doesnt like to be recognized by the motherboard, but it works perfectly fine with my home PC. its in a USB case. other than that, Roadrunner just runs really slow, as well as Frodo. it takes a little while for things to load up. and still i dont have a proper case for the carputer. if anything i was going to use an old amplifier chassis to fit the carputer inside. but that still requires me to get the plexi to replace the sides of the case because its not wide enough.

i feel that i can probably sell off the MII that i have for fairly decent price. the xenarc will only cost me 350 used... and its their complete system setup 1. i just need a carnetix 1900 to run it.

but it looks like you guys are telling me that 2ghz celeron isnt that much better than an MII12000

bigaaron · 06-22-2006, 12:40 AM

I've got the old m10k and it has always played music purfect with the audigy2 nx.

Now if I could just get all the bugs out of my RR I would be great!

miztahsparklez · 06-22-2006, 04:58 AM

well its not that it doesnt play music great, it just makes annoying pauses in music.

breaker021 · 06-22-2006, 09:40 AM

Dude, I had a epia board before and... to be rather frank, they're not worth all the hype that everyone gives them.

yeah they're small.

yeah they look cool in those small small cases

but to get a epia system (board+proc) that truly performs a a desktop grade machine, you may as well go for the desktop.

if you have money to burn, go for the via p4 option.

otherwise, get a used $300 dell p4 system from craigslist or ebay, and just throw it in your trunk. yeah, it's not as small and as cute as the via, but at least you're not paying double the price for half the performance.

imo.

im using a tablet laptop right now and it works quite well. it has a touch screen so i didnt have to get a dinky 7" lilliput that i have to use with my nails.

celerons, as bad as they are, will perform much better than what you have. if you have the money, you should even get a used p4 chip rather than a aceleron (assuming your board accepts p4s, of course)
- sh00k

miztahsparklez · 06-22-2006, 05:02 PM

okay, ill go for the xenarc pc. i believe they offer one in P4 format, so if needed i should be able to upgrade no problem. not to mention ill be getting a decent price for my current carputer that will pay for the new setup. i might be losing out on what i paid, but as long as i get something that works to replace it, its all good.

-zip- · 06-22-2006, 10:32 PM

Did you ever upgrade your USB drivers to the Audigy2 NX? If your Epia board system is configured correctly, your audigy running, and other devices you should be around 50% CPU load.

A possiblity of the skiping of the music is the Wifi card sharing the same PCI bus as all the other devices. The work around is to use Winc, or to turn off Windows zero what ever its called wireless network as it auto searches. So when you drive by a wifi spot your music will delay or pause for a second. This problem is easy to fix... anyways to late.

You are correct in the visuals department though, if that is soooooo important an Epia is not the right board if running full Milkdrop, G-Force etc.

miztahsparklez · 06-22-2006, 10:46 PM

well i havent bought anything yet.

im not sure if there was any new updates to the audigy 2nx. everything ran okay, its bearable. but its slow. and cpu ran at like 90% or something. though i wasnt able to get the flash patch to see if that fixed it. hmm the wifi thing seems somewhat interesting, as i think i do remember when i first added the pcmica card is when the audio first started skipping... though, i think sometimes it would do it randomly, or even if the card is disabled it would still do it.

and yes i was running milkdrop sometimes, but strangely enough, it ran fine with it going to the beat and whatnot. but yeah it took a little while to load up.