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

Interesting Specs

[XBL]

These are from the MWave site (notice the FireWire!):

VIA VT8604 North Bridge
Host interface
Integrated Savage4 2D/3D Graphics Engine
PC 133 SDRAM/VCM interface
PCI interface
ACPI Compliant

VIA VT82C686B South Bridge
UDMA 33/66/100 IDE interface
USB interface
AC97 Controller
Integrated Super I/O controller
Integrated hardware monitoring controller
Power management meet ACPI requirement
RTC

CPU: Socket 370 type CPU
Intel Celeron with 66MHz FSB (100MHz FSB for future CPU)
Intel Pentium III with 100 / 133MHz FSB

FSB
66 / 100 / 133MHz

Form Factor
Flex ATX: 7" X 7.5"

Memory
DIMM x 2, Up to 512MB of 168-pin PC100 /PC133 SDRAM

Graphics
Built in Savage 4 graphics engine

Audio
VIA audio with AC'97 CODEC

On board 1394 chipset
Lucent FW323
1394a OHCI link and PHY in single package
Complies with 1394 OHCI specification revision 1.0
Provides three fully compliant cable ports
Support 400Mb/s, 200Mb/s, 100Mb/s data transfer rate

Ethernet
On board Realtek 8139C
IEEE 802.3u 100Base-T specifications compliant
10 Mb/s and 100 Mb/s operation
Supports Wake-On-LAN function

Modem (optional)
Proprietary Modem riser Module
V.90 compliant

Expansion Bus
1 x PCI
PCI 2.2 specification compliant

I/O
Built in VIA 686B
Support 1 UART for Complete Serial Ports
Support 1 Multi-mode parallel port
Support 1 Floppy Disk Controller
Support PS2 keyboard and mouse

H/W Monitor
Built in VIA686B
Voltage, Temperature, Fan Speed Monitor

IDE
Ultra DMA 33/66/100 mode
PIO mode 4
2 IDE ports

Power Management
APM 1.2
ACPI 1.0

BIOS
Award PnP BIOS
DMI 2.3
2Mb flash memory

Back Panel Ports and Connectors
1 x PS/2 Keyboard
1 x PS/2 Mouse
1 x VGA port
1 x Serial Port
1 x Parallel port, supports SPP, ECP, and EPP mode
2 x 1394 ports
1 x S connector
1 x Composite connector
2 x USB ports
1 x RJ45 port
1 x line-in connector
1 x line-out connector

Other connectors and jumpers
2 x fan connectors
2 x Front Panel USB Connector Header
Front side line-out and mic-In Header
CD Audio in connector
Clear CMOS
1 x ATX power connector

Others Feature
CPU Voltage Auto Detecting (CPU PnP)
Support Suspend to Ram
Power on by Ring
Wake-On-LAN

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.

Re:Interesting Specs

[bergeron76]

It would be quite interesting. I should know. I've done it.

Tell me what you think.

Well...

[connorbd]

It does the job of being a small and workable system, and that's about it. It'd be a good cluster box, IMHO, but man... mofo is *ugly*.

Would I buy one? I don't know -- probably if they put it in a nicer case, but not like that. But I speak as someone who still lives at home and doesn't necessarily have space concerns that this box would address. (And I mean, really -- if space was truly an issue, why not just buy a Cappucino box and be done with it?)

What I want to see -- and I'm serious about this -- are a consumer-electronics-type case for a PC with an IR reciever and a graphical LED front panel (for media control) and a wooden case meant to match those "executive" mini-stereos from The Sharper Image...

/Brian

Re:Well...

[tswinzig]

But I speak as someone who still lives at home...

I think it's safe to say that everyone lives at home.

Windows XP dumb terminal

[Mwongozi]

At the risk of being modded down for supporting Microsoft...

Windows XP has a thing called "remote desktop connection", which is a lot like remote X connections on Linux, except that things like sound and hardware ports are also brought across to the remote machine.

My home LAN has a fairly beefy PC on it running Windows XP Pro, and it would be really useful to have a few cheap and small PCs thrown about the house, which could connect back to the main PC in my bedroom and bring the desktop to wherever you are.

Right now I use a laptop with an 802.11b card in it to do that, but that's a seriously expensive solution.

Re:Windows XP dumb terminal

[Mwongozi]

So you mean like VNC, except slower and more expensive? :)

RDC is much faster than VNC on Windows, because:

• VNC isn't very good at working out which bits of the desktop have been redrawn (Or Windows isn't very good at telling it...)
• RDC gets the remote machine to draw widgets, with the host machine saying things like "Draw this widget here", rather than sending bitmaps for everything.

It also resizes your desktop to whatever resolution the remote machine is using, which is quite nice. VNC doesn't do sound or ports either.

Re:Windows XP dumb terminal

[Locutus]

I will counter your trollosity by pointing out the wonderful feature of X windows where I can throw remote windows around with a simple command line argument. Its neat having 30 some-odd machines put their load monitors up on one desktop.

True. But can't you do that with an X Server on Windows instead? That way, you can run thousands more applications than you can with Linux alone.

Ahh, now we see what flutters in this guys head. Doh. Grasshopper, an X-Server is meerly a display server and only shows that which is generated elsewhere. Surely one could have an X-Server running on a MCWindows machine and have all those powerful Linux machines ( or Solaris, etc ) sending displays to it. But every MCWindows crash would require you to resend all those displays again.
You see, Grasshopper, how the power of the many can be maintained and controlled by the few in the *nix world. The power of the many in the MCWindows world requires many to maintain and control. ;/

LoB

Re:Windows XP dumb terminal

[radish]

I've used vern for virtual desktops on every PC I've used for a few years now, that covers 95/98/NT4/2K and now XP, on a variety of hardware. Give it a spin - not perfect but pretty good.

Noise level?

[larien]

Anyone know how noisy (or quiet) these are? With only one fan, I'd expect it to be pretty good.

Reason I ask is that I'm looking to get ADSL soon (on order, actually) and I'd like to run a linux box as gateway/router/firewall on the ADSL and this looks ideal provided it's quiet enough.

Home management / automation

[aegilops]

Consider its use as a home device management "brain". A gadget doesn't have to look smart or pretty, or have particular high throughput - it just needs to have the right I/O and never go wrong.

Consider this: you arrive at work, and ask yourself "Did I lock the front door?" Well, by using simple devices like this, wired in to your home security system (which, of course, we all have) you could find out. How about - the 'fridge door hasn't shut properly, and now your Jolt Colas (or whatever) are getting too warm. Better send an alarm (SNMP...) to you - while you're at work. Someone rings the front door bell at your house, and your webcam above the door switches on, streams video to your PC at work (naturally, as blessed by your local Firewall obergruppenfuhrer) for you to either remotely unlock the front door, or for you to choose to ignore it, and finally, schedule a random light activation pattern for when you go on holiday.

OK, this device isn't really all about these developments, but simple, I/O enabled boxes, which are ready to go through a web interface, can SNMP on to your domestic home appliances, and are secure enough would represent a good market. They don't have to look all that sexy, but just be cheap and functional, and WORK.

Two parenthetical comments in closing, however:

1) I don't expect for a second that all those white goods manufacturers will agree to an open standard, and we'll end up with a plethora of separate boxes controlling different sub-systems at home (a bit like any control panel near the computer room), and
2) Am I really that forgetful when I leave the house? Hey - now did I lock the car door...

Aegilops

Try this case from Yeong Yang

[Uggy]

I like THIS case. It'll fit a normal micro ATX MB and you're not confined to special low profile cards, or limited expansion slots. And it looks a helluva lot better than that shit above.

The Smallest

I bought the motherboard, then sent it back.

[krafter]

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)

editor anyone?

[tdye]

Is it just me, or has VIAHardware fired all the editors and disabled grammar/spell checking on their word processors?

"...opening up the case for maintenance is much simpler and don't require the use of tools."

"Let's take a peak inside..."

And my favorite on page one (I didn't bother with page two):

"Due to the small size of the case, everything inside is cramped in, thus making it impossible to install better cooling, this isn't exactly a negative point, since it is an OEM barebones system, and the lesser the cooling components, the quieter the system runs. "

It's hard to take a review seriously when the writer sounds suspiciously like he's failing 9th grade English.

Re:DIY dvd player anyone?

[brunes69]

Question... Why would you spend 5x the cost of a store bought DVD player to build on yourself that s largr, uses more power, looks worse, and (without the 5.1 audio) sounds worse ?

Chassis produced by AMS Electronics

[HuangBaoLin]

I have a friend who works for the company (AMS Electronics) who makes this aluminum chassis. They sell the same barebones product (called GBOX) direct off their website.

http://www.amselectronics.com/Products/PC_Servers/ CF-7989.html

They've changed the front slightly to accept a variety of clear or colored pexiglass shields. This is a great product! Damn sexy and a perfect PC to lug around (just add handle :P )

Re:Why Linux routers?

[larien]

Routers have limited features; I should have added that I'd probably also put other stuff on it (ie, run an NFS/Samba server, Apache + anything else I feel like).

Re:Use ideas

[unitron]

How good is the Tivo service? If a last minute change (news bulletin, late-running football game, etc) causes a network to time shift its evening schedule from 8:00-11:00 to 8:17:30-11:17:30, does it catch the change? If it was supposed to tape the 8:00-9:00 show and then change channels to catch a movie starting at 9:00, are you screwed, and in which direction?

Apple's Cube

[Migelikor1]

The last really big effort to sell a teensy weensy computer was the G3 cube, and they discovered that there's just not enough of a market to support it. People aren't worried enough about desktop space to make the compromises inherent in a smaller case. Now, I think that the little machines are cute, but it's a little ridiculous to think that pure cute can sell...you need some muscle or a good hook (iMac's integration, G4's power), not just a little tissue box.