Heres my latest project I am going to undertake, its gonna take some modding and ingenious ideas on keeping it cool and quiet as it will be running 24hrs a day.

Click here for more info

sounds like a good idea

Use the quietest water cooling kit you can find, get like a crappy aquarious 2 or something, cause they dont generate heat but this way you can cool the cpu,vga,and chip set with one fan running and this will make the system last alot longer considering the temps it would run at. Anywho thats what id do.

And since you wont be near it get a digital flow control sensor so if the flow stops then the comp will shut down cause fried cpus suck!

Umm, yes I was thinking of using water cooling, is there anything I can do to protect against leaks as there will be tonnes of data on that thing, and I dont want it to disappear, or lose any of the components.

Because it would be on a mini scale I would have to put the res on the outside which would only leave leaking down to the tubing?

It dosent matter whether you post in that forum or here. Can anyone recommend a mini-ITX board? I dont want it too powerful as its just gonna act as a file server with mysql running to host my database there.

I have seen some from via, but have not read much about them.

the VIA EPIA or EPIA-M series would be your best bet. They range from 533MHz to 1GHz, and they have (almost)everything built on to the board. All you need is a PCI video card if your gonna hook it up to a monitor, but if your not, it has s-video out so you can hook it up to a TV. I think they have Ethernet built in, but not totally sure, check http://Mini-ITX.com/

Edit: And also, a few of them are fanless so you wont even need to really worry about cooling

Yes that would seem a good option.

I was also thinking about getting a couple of old laptop drives but then the space that two small expensive drives would take up I could just use one larger normal size drive.

I am not going to hook this upto a monitor, but if I need to do work on it (not using remote software etc) I would need to hook it up.

I have some old 8MB ATI graphics cards about, so I could use one of those.

Thanks for all of your help

Ok some more info, lets see what suggestions you come up with.

I want to keep this as small as possible, and I have a Beantech transparent case sitting on my desk at the moment, and this server is going to be somewhere around it.

Should I make it match its 'bigger brother'? Shall I built it myself or by it pre-built?

I have seen the board I want to get, ill post the model later. It has on-board sound, graphics and network card. So I will not need any PCI cards, I have an average size CD-ROM drive here and a couple of normal size IDE hard disks for it.

If I built it myself I will need to get a power supply, can anyone recommend one?

Thanks

Mike

Jameco has some small PSU's.

Thanks, I checked out the link but I am in the UK so I would like places in the UK, but at least it gives me an idea and shows me what I can get.

How good is the mini-ITX support with linux?, I am planning to use Debian but I can also use Mandrake as I have the latest of that here.

If it is not very good, I will just have to go for a mini-ATX board and either use a Zalman flower passive cooling or some sort of active, preferably water.

Thanks

Mike

http://www.mini-itx.com/faq.asp#Software0

Great thanks, I think I am almost 100% ready to start ordering the components, I am going to custom make some stuff and proberly stick with passive and a small amount of active air cooling.