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shuttle has been making small, fast, and quiet for some years now.

the hard drive is the loudest thing in my shuttle SFF, and that's already a very quiet maxtor with FDB. you can't even hear the fan at all.

See mini-itx.com for a much more complete list of products and reviews.

(Top left corner: "Tom takes notice", referring to the belated nature of the Tom's Hardware article.)

http://www.spacewalker.com/english/wheretobuy.htm

Which takes you to list of suppliers by country.

P.S. For residents of the UK, try under England.

You can open it in mozilla by going here. I have no idea why they insist on IE, looks the same in both browsers.

I guess you could check out their "official site." It's slow as all hell though.

I have built two Spacewalker computers: the SV-24 and the SV-25. They match all your requirements, with the exception of "flat" (they are cubes).

They come with rather cheap and noisy fans. I replaced all of them with Verax fans for the case and CPU and a Papst fan for the PSU.

The SV-24 has a Cyrix 900 MHz CPU. I plan to try passive cooling, as this CPU uses only about 10 W and can take about 80 C, much better than a Celeron or Athlon/Duron. On the other hand, these Verax fans are so quiet that you do not hear them anyway, so it is somewhat pointless to remove the fan.

Shuttle has already announced plans to buid a "shoebox" computer (SS40) to support AMD processors.

Specs are here:

A shuttle SV24, since that thing runs on a fairly low wattage power supply but has integrated ethernet, small form factor, quiet operation, and plenty of other stuff useful in a server. It also looks cool and supports PIIIs up to 1 ghz.

How about using the USB ports for audio? You probably don't want a cheap pair of USB speakers, but perhaps just a box you can hook up from USB to your amplifier. A quick web search found one but of course I have no idea if it meets your quality needs. If this works, you could use any laptop with decent USB.

Perhaps you could get a small computer that has a PCI slot, such as a Shuttle SV24. Get a flat-screen display and a small keyboard and mouse, and then stick in your choice of high-quality PCI-based sound card. This plus a couple of carrying cases would be about as functional as a lunchbox portable, and a heck of a lot cheaper.

Good luck.

steveha

What you want to do is very possible. I had the same situation.
I bought one CPU to start out with and built up my system, knowing that I didnt want to replace my mobo. I have the Microstar 6120, its a dual slot1 mobo with onboard adaptec scsi. I bought it 3 years ago (phew) right when the BX chipset came out. It is relatively inexpensive in its class and is rock solid. It has bus speeds Auto/100/112/133 so it can take all sorts of cpus. I have been running on dual PII-450s recently. My friend is using a Shuttle 649A with a P3 and that motherboard (imho) is not as stable. My system has been runing rock solid using the Microstar. Specs here, and a great price

I bought my cpus from Step-Thermodynamics which I have absolutely nothing to complain about. The coolers on those are simply the best. They add a ton to the stablity and performance (I got the 400-450 step).

Good luck in finding what you need
-Chris