One reason you have (or will have) heat and power conumption problems with your pc104 system is because of the pentium architecture. A 550MHZ Xeon chip will eat around 34W whereas something like a 500MHZ PowerPC only uses 6W (and will generally do around twice as much per MHz as the pentium!!), and don't forget, most of that 34W will also have to be disapated as heat! The ARM architecture is RISC based and low power consumption (which also translates to low heat output). It is also capable of more per MHz than a typical pentium - don't forget the empeg (which has a 220MHz ARM processor) is only using around 30% processor capacity while playing MP3s with the visuals on!

I'd personally much rather have an efficient low consumption box in my dashboard that something that needs fans and 4 gauge power wires. Part of the appeal of the emeg is also that it fits in a standard DIN slot - I don't want any boxes in my boot!

(list 6284, Mk1 S/N 00299 4GB blue [for sale]. Mk2 S/N 080000094 26GB blue)