Shuttle's Tiny PC Reviewed

PhantomHarlock writes "VIAHardware posted a review of a great miniature PC desktop system from Shuttle, the motherboard manufacturer. It's a tiny aluminum case with a floppy bay and one 5 1/4 bay. It uses Shuttle's FV24 mobo, one of the smallest on the market. The motherboard has built in video (with S-Video out), audio, 10/100 Ethernet, USB and dual firewire ports. " Might be a nifty device to use as a stereo component with that S-Video out.

Comments

Re:Interesting Specs

[jandrese]

On board Realtek 8139C

Man, why is it when companies build in NICs on motherboards they always choose the crappiest one they can find? Bill Paul has some choice words to say about this card (taken from if_rl.c in the FreeBSD source tree).

/*
* The RealTek 8139 PCI NIC redefines the meaning of 'low end.' This is
* probably the worst PCI ethernet controller ever made, with the possible
* exception of the FEAST chip made by SMC. The 8139 supports bus-master
* DMA, but it has a terrible interface that nullifies any performance
* gains that bus-master DMA usually offers.
*
* For transmission, the chip offers a series of four TX descriptor
* registers. Each transmit frame must be in a contiguous buffer, aligned
* on a longword (32-bit) boundary. This means we almost always have to
* do mbuf copies in order to transmit a frame, except in the unlikely
* case where a) the packet fits into a single mbuf, and b) the packet
* is 32-bit aligned within the mbuf's data area. The presence of only
* four descriptor registers means that we can never have more than four
* packets queued for transmission at any one time.
*
* Reception is not much better. The driver has to allocate a single large
* buffer area (up to 64K in size) into which the chip will DMA received
* frames. Because we don't know where within this region received packets
* will begin or end, we have no choice but to copy data from the buffer
* area into mbufs in order to pass the packets up to the higher protocol
* levels.
*
* It's impossible given this rotten design to really achieve decent
* performance at 100Mbps, unless you happen to have a 400Mhz PII or
* some equally overmuscled CPU to drive it.
*
* On the bright side, the 8139 does have a built-in PHY, although
* rather than using an MDIO serial interface like most other NICs, the
* PHY registers are directly accessible through the 8139's register
* space. The 8139 supports autonegotiation, as well as a 64-bit multicast
* filter.
*
* The 8129 chip is an older version of the 8139 that uses an external PHY
* chip. The 8129 has a serial MDIO interface for accessing the MII where
* the 8139 lets you directly access the on-board PHY registers. We need
* to select which interface to use depending on the chip type.
*/

The worst part is, it's not that expensive to build decent 10/100 chips these days. NetGear and LinkSys sell decent cards for as little as $5 a pop. There's really no reason to go with the RealTeks anymore.