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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.
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
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)
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.
I read the internet for the articles.