Hi!

First, sorry for my English .....

Secondly, I have a very interesting project, I have to build a MiniPC (as litle as possible) .... The motherboard should only have:

1 x Socket 370
1 x Internal USB
3 x External USB
1 x VGA out
1 x Socket RAM Dim 100 / 133 Mhz
1 x AT Power Connector

The idea is to Retire everything I don´t need (like IDEs, ISA Ports, AT P-C, Etc.) from a normal Motherboard and put what I really need in a new board

The PC will be used in many different projects (most of them relationed with Robotic)

My question is simple ..... Think it is impossible ?

* If you are interested on it, you can join my team, contact me at MSN (DMilardovich@hotmail.com).

Thank you for reading!

As long as there are menus in the BIOS for the motherboard you aquire it should be no problem to disable these items.

Care to rectify what this project is for? School project?

Do you already have the hardware?

It sounds like an interesting project but a little more info would be nice...

Thank you for your answere!

It is a private project, (not for school), Im part of an international team -Argentine, Belgium and Uruguay-

I have the Hardware ready! .....

The idea is to create a MiniPC, as cheap as possible, as litle as possible ..... (Thats why I want to retire ISA Sockets, IDEs, etc etc)

We will use it in a Robotic project at the moment, but Im sure that it will be very useful at many other things (like a normal PC).

Is the idea to reduce power consumption as much as possible or is there other reasons for this?

power consumption is no the problem ..... the problem is the size

Hmm, so let me try to better understand. You need to shrink the size of the components and you want to physically remove these add ons on the motherboard instead of disabling them?

The motherboard wafer is what it is and theres not much of any way to reduce the size of that due to the multi layer circuitry.

One thing to try would be to drop the 3.5inch hard drive and get a laptop hard drive and use an adapter to connect it to the motherboard. This will greatly reduce size and weight just from that.

Maybe even use a TEC cooler and solder the cooler to get power from the psu. I would get a small heatsink made from a local machine shop and have a low profile fan mounted on it to pull the heat from the TEC.

http://customthermoelectric.com/te [...] xgodFwMZNQ

Am I understanding this correctly and are you limited to only using the parts provided or can you add or remove as you wish making parts to your specifications?

Does this motherboard look to be smaller than yours?

http://cgi.ebay.com/INTEL-MICRO-AT [...] otohosting

It appears to have only 1 vga connector on the backplate area and nothing else.

Heres another site with a better pic:

http://www.hypermicro.com/itemdesc [...] 20&eq=&Tp=

This is assuming that you can change your hardware...

what is the availability of atom atm that is quite small

Forget the idea of buying a Mini-ITX ..... They don´t exist here

My idea is simple, remove what I dont need and put what I rally need in a new Board ..... Just tell me if you think that it is possible ... (Y)

Again, to be clear are you asking to physically remove the components from the motherboard to make it "smaller" or are you simply disabling these features?

It threw me for a loop when you said "remove these items to make it smaller".

Removing some or maybe all of them might be possible but I dont think I have ever heard of seen of anyone doing it. Are you good at soldering?

the intricacy of the circuits would be ridiculous trying to take parts of one board or another and physically take them off and put them on another board i would argue that without the machining tools etc of a large modern company that makes chips boards etc this would be impossible, just think their are 370 separate wires just for the cpu then add chips sets etc i believe it would be impossible

I think removing some components might be possible but would be very limited if possible at all.