March 2006 - Another year , another mother board.
I had been searching eBay for a replacement ITX board for my PVR for a few months; it had became obvious I was not going to find a fix for the TV output of the Insight P4-ITX. So, when a couple of iBase boards came up for sale I thought I have a bid on one.
Unfortunately, I bid on the one without a TV output - at least I thought I had...
During a very pleasant email conversation with the eBay seller, I found that, although the board I had bid on did have a TV out, the seller didn’t think it was ‘all that good’ and that, in any case he was happy to cancel my bid because he was going to re-list the item (he had discovered there were a couple of bits missing from the box). I asked if he’d considered a Buy-It-Now price, he re-listed it a bargain price and now I’m the owner of a iBase MB890F ITX board with a 1.6Ghz Pentium Mobile (worth more than I paid for the whole kit!)
The MB890 is an impressive piece of kit:
On-board power supply takes 12 or 19 vdc
DVI, VGA, LVDS panel and CVBS outputs
PCI and mini-PCI slots
Gigabit LAN
Optional Compact Flash socket
Two Firewire ports on the back panel
Six USB ports
Two selectable RS232, RS422, RS485 comports
Onboard 44pin IDE for directly connecting a 2.5” drive
Watchdog and 4bit I/O port
The Pentium 4 mobile processor is also a gem
Spec Number SL7EG
Processor Frequency 1.60 GHz CPUID String 06D6h
Package Type 478 pin Core Voltage 1.340V – 1.276V
Bus Speed 400 MHz Thermal Guideline 21.0W
Core Stepping B1 Thermal Spec 100°C
L2 Cache Size 2 MB Manufacturing Technology 90 nm
L2 Cache Speed 1.60 GHz Bus/Core Ratio 16
Although the iBase works incredibly well, I have found a couple of snags:
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All attempts to get both PCI slots working with either the Samsung or Tranquil risers have failed. I’m currently using a single DigiTV PCI card and an external DigiTV-USB tuner. I may purchase a new USB slave device and mount it internally
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The serial ports on the iBase don’t work well with the display, but since I’m also having problems getting the visual basic serial driver to survive hibernation properly, I’ll look into using the 256x64 dot matrix VFD instead.
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Update: I’ve since solved the serial port problem with some small changes to PVRassistant. The display and SCART switch are now working fine.
