Mini-ITX on Battery power?

[Magsy]

I'm thinking about knocking up a Mini-ITX pc in an old Technics CD player I have, drop in my damaged 0404 and use the digital out to a DAC.

Making the remote control/frontpanel buttons work is easy, maybe I can work the display too. There would be a TV next to the rack so it can be plugged into that for user interface. I'm going fanless/diskless, either network boot or IDE Flash / CF, hopefully I can make a cdrom fit the case.

Anyway, these boards need little power and there are many dc-dc convertors on offer that only require a 12v regulated feed.

Does anybody think powering this via batteries might yield improvements? (we always talk about dirty pc power hampering the soundcards!)

Does the dc-dc convertor add its own 'nastiness' to the supply?

 

[jerb]

i doubt that you will be able to run it for very long. however most of them take dc in (vs AC in on desktops) so you could use a nice regulated wallwart or even tangents STEPS to power it ( i doubt that there would be much "dirt power" if you powered it from tangents steps)

if im wrong please correct me, i havent looked at any of the boards recently

 

[lini]

Well, I you have a love for car batteries, you could give it a go. Not that it would make much sense to feed very clean power to a computer board full of switching transistors, imo - but then again, maybe it does...

Greetings from Hannover!

Manfred / lini

 

[Titanium Lizzard]

People think that just because an ITX board is small, it draws little power. Wrong, this will kill a laptop battery in a matter of minutes. And in defense to PC's, the ATX standard is set so the rails cannot have a fluxiation of + .05 volts. And as for the amperage, trust me, you can run several ITX boards off a single PSU, just don't buy the no-name brand crap.

And as for any further ITX questions, try this site

 

[Magsy]

So a laptop draws less power than a VIA Mini ITX? Do you have some figures?

http://resources.mini-box.com/online...simulator.html

That gives me 10-20w for the low end EPIA.

The battery is just an idea, I was planning to use STEPS or something similar unless there was a major benefit.