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Old 03-10-2007, 09:04 AM   #28
MikeB
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Hampshire
Posts: 572

MikeB
Welcome to the forum Paul.

As one of the people who've bought a PX10000 I can say that so far it seems great except that it will NOT go into S3 standby correctly. I am in discussions with VIA about this via the suppliers but I don't hold out much hope of a satisfactory answer. My conclusion is that the BIOS is telling the OS that S3 is supported but it is not actually implementing S3 correctly. It always leaves the PSU on. I have not gone so far as to run my car pc s/w on it yet so can't say how well it performs, but I think it should be fine for everything you want to do while driving. It does support hibernation.

Hibernate is OK but it is annoying waiting the 30s or so for the system to restart. Occassionally PCs fail to restart from Hibernate and a full reboot is needed.

Before you remove your headunit, you need to have decided that you don't want a radio. Despite what some people say, there is as yet (IMO) no satisfactory solution commercially available for radio in a car PC and you should forget any thought of TV!

I have a Golf with a drawer under the seat. You will not get a PC in there! Well, maybe just if you use the Pico-ITX and the latest M3-ATX PSU. The drawer is really quite small. It's just big enough for a TrafficMaster YQ2 so I'd guess about 12cm square and 5cm deep. Also, you do need quite a few cables from the PC to the display, amp and whatever else you connect via USB.

Choose the display carefully. If I were buying one today, I'd go for the LinITX TMR high brightness one. Currently I have a 450 nit display from CarTFT which is OK but it does get washed out when the sun shines on it, and it is frustrating not being able to quite read the display sometimes. I have not seen the TMR display myself but it gets good reviews. Even better is a true transflective display: with one of these, the sun really is not an issue. I used one on holiday in France this year when I did a lash-up with my laptop in our other car and it was far better than the display in my Golf. Unfortunately you can only get transfelctive displays in 6.5" 640x480 and 8.4" 800x600 and bigger sizes and they are very expensive.

Finally, and sorry that this is turning out to be a bit negative, you can easily spend more on the PC than is required to buy a good double-DIN DVD/radio/navigation unit such as the Kenwood DNX7200 which will do pretty much everything that a car PC will do, albeit with a different set of compromises. Don't underestimate the amount of work needed to get a PC to work well in a car and don't over-estimate how good it will be, in terms of reliability, usability and appearance in your dashboard.

If after this you still are determined to go ahead, then enjoy the ride and good luck.

Mike.
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Golf V GT Tdi DSG
Work-in-progress: Intel DG45FC, E7400, 2GB ram, Intel 160GB SSD, DAB radio, M4-ATX
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