I love these things. The original reason for trying them was to have a silent (no fan) system. The 533/600MHz Edens are wonderful for installations and really cheap now.

Best all rounder is the 1GHz Nehemia imo, I've gigged with one instead of a laptop and they are very reliable. You can run them fanless with careful heatsinking.

All the M series are good, many flavours to choose from. The downside of USB1 types is slow boot time.

The most powerful mini-itx form are the Celerons, built a couple of custom small form factor servers for people using these and last time I checked they had almost a year of uptime.

On the bad side...some of the advanced features like hardware mpeg decompression don't work without Windows. Also don't buy anything from mini-itx.com though. I had one DOA and after I shipped it back they never sent the goods. They don't answer any correspondence. Basically I got ripped off, really dodgy crooked company, so suggest you use http://www.icp-epia.co.uk/or an alternative.

I'm currently shopping around for a small motherboard that I can put in a "headless" (no screen, mouse, keyboard) box as a laptop replacement for live performance. There's quite a few different processors to choose from on the Mini-ITX site, but I wonder if anyone has any experience using them for audio?

Of course there's Intel Pentium M and Core, Core Duo and Celeron processors, as well as various VIA and Nehemiah CPUs.

Any recommendable? Any to avoid? The system will be harddrive-less (Linux OS on CF card), so if anyone has any suggestions please let me know.

best, derek