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Shuttle's Tiny PC Reviewed

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the curiously-small-pcs dept.

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.

1 of 302 comments (clear)

  1. I bought the motherboard, then sent it back. by krafter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I bought the FV24 motherboard a few months ago. It is truly an amazing little board with tons of features packed into it.

    I planned on using the motherboard to create a mp3 player I could put in my stereo rack. I put a 60gig ATA100 drive in the machine, a 466 Celeron and 256mb of memory. I didn't add any cards to the machine because everything I needed was on the motherboard.

    I also had a USB audio device from Onkyo, the SE-U55, which I was going to use so that I could connect the output to the optical input on my receiver.

    I installed Win2k on the machine, I know because of that I won't get much sympathy here on slashdot.

    The first problem I had was that the sound coming out of the onboard audio device was garbage. Mp3s played fine but sounded distorted. I tried many other sources of audio and everything was coming out distorted.

    I figured it was just bad on board audio so I switched to the USB audio device and it also sounded distorted.

    I then tested everything using my Compaq E500 laptop and it sounded great so I knew it was the hardware.

    I did some research and found that the southbridge on the motherboard was in the family of VIA chipsets that seemed to be causing problems for other people. I tried new drivers and every hint I could find online but nothing seemed to work.

    I bought a different motherboard with a non-via chipset and everything has been great since. I miss the small size of the FV24 but I don't miss the unusable audio.

    Chris (krafter@zilla.net)