12 volt power supplies

[Guest]

I'm in the process of building a "marine" computer for use
on a racing sailboat. I've been looking around but haven't
had much luck finding things like 12-volt power supplies,
"rugged-ized" chassis, etc. I figured one good thing would
be to buy an ATX motherboard that supported the mobile power
cpus and chipsets, to keep the power consumption low.

Any pointers, recomendations or other thoughts greatly
appreciated!

Thanks,
Mike

 

[ejsmith2]

Computer + water=non-soluable
Computer + saltwater=really non-soluable

That's about all I can think of, sorry. Good luck finding one under $7000. You'd probably have to go with an impedence keyboard, as even a little spray of water (over time) will destroy/rust a normal one.

 

[Guest]

Hi,

Thanks for the response. Yes we thought about the moisture
problem. The computer will be tucked into a pretty good
location so it shouldn't suffer any direct water splashes.
And keeping the computer powered up helps lower the moisture
buildup.

As to the $7000. There are a number of expensive already
equipped marine computers but they are usually slow (500Mhz
Celeron is considered top of the line) and have very low
resolution screens. We figure that the money we save by
going a more mainstream approach will allow us to upgrade
in 2 or 3 years -- about when the non-marine computer is
starting to fall apart from the environment. ;-) Plus we
get state of the art now.

Thanks,
Mike

 

[ejsmith2]

If you want something that's good for the price, check into the asus laptops. As a bonus, if you happen to lose the computer to a little water, you won't be $3000 in the hole, just $1500. I use a dell laptop, and after the first year, it started comming apart at the seams. Needless to say, I don't recommend Dell.