What can I make with a 1.5ghz Socket 478 Pentium4? Looking for new project ideas
 

So I was just handed an old socket 478 Socket Pentium4 @ 1.5ghz.

At first I thought, ohhhh, another rig to build and suckle on my electric bill. But then I realized that I made a commitment to get rid of old parts and not pack-rat everything.

That's where I need a project. You see, these chips old go for $15.00 on Ebay, and I will sell it for like $9-10 dollars otherwise, but I would love to make it the center of say, an ITX based router board running linux, or a media box in the the media cabinet that pushes the sound between the receiver and the computer (Think of Linksys's media center devices)

What ideas do you have? To keep this realistic, lets call the budget at $150.00 and try and use ebay where possible.

Any ideas TFP'ers, or just sell it for a ten spot?

Buy yourself some analog tuners and make a mythtv box.

I'd suggest going with a couple pvr 150's (avoid the 500 it has image quality problems with the new tuners).

file server is what my old system does. and the system before that does my network shaping and routing.

Do you even have a need for anything at all? Just chill it until you come up with something.

LOL...
 

it would make a great NAS ;)

how about L.A.M.P.ing it with maybe asterisk and set up a nice little home PBX :)...you can even plop mythTV over that

hmmm,

Most small form factor boards use MIPS or other small power chips to run. Which is a shame because my two biggest interests are for a HiFI streaming system or small form-factor router like MikroTik makes.

Are there any good motherbaords or custom boards that fit either of these uses without breaking the bank?

Yeah, I bought a pvr-500 to put in my mce box and the quality was shite. After doing some research, I found that my card is of the newest batch that has a fix for the crappy tuner problem. I downloaded the beta drivers and the picture cleared right up. You just have to make sure you don't get the model B cards without the fixed tuners.

Why not just make a simple media center? you don't need anything special to share the media around your place. Throw a TV tuner in and you'd be set. I'm running a 1Ghz celeron in my media center and it does everything and more.

What OS do you use?

I'm now looking at using the chip to create a Windows Home Server Beta box. Can anyone recomend a good small form-factor board that can be picked up off Ebay that would fit in a small case?

I'm looking for something ITX or similar size (Think the tiny Shuttle boxes) that will fit one harddrive with a the DVD drive in the case, and a second hard drive one I pull the DVD after windows install.

i have an asus pundit small form factor, every video out you can think of (I'm using a DVI to HDMI cable, every audio out you want, i'm using optical spdif. they dont make the one i have anymore, but check them out.

http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=1&l2=3

This might be too late for you, but I just came across this on the net, seems to be exactly what you are thinking:

Home Server Hacks: Build a Green $400 Windows Home Server - Part 1: Getting started

Server would be good. I have a dedicated file server that I back up everything to.

That CPU won't run anything HD without skipping I bet, so it's not a good idea for mythTV. Just saying.

For a router it's massive overkill, but will work.

A FTP server, put all your movies/music on it, and anyone with a username/password on it can access it remotely and upload/Download from it. The other stuff mentioned above seems a bit overkill, TBH, but that may be because I always wanted an extra rig for a FTP.