Slashdot Mirror
New Small Form Factor PC Reviewed
Beau Mundt writes "You guys haven't touched on the small form factor PCs in a while, thought you
would be interested in this
review of a Lex System SFF PC. Its arguably the tiniest PC around and could
be used for many cool things like a Linux gateway, a wireless workstation, or
just a silent small foot print system. The other neat thing is the reviewer
stuffs a P3 1.26 and a Radeon 7500 into the system. Perfect for bringing to LANs!"
I like the Shuttle boxes, because you can stuff standard parts in them, standard drives and the likes.
This however, has too many limitations to be of use to me. Sure, you can attach a lot of USB peripherals (Is it USB 2? I didn't see that in the review), but if you want a PC small enough to lug around, then you don't want to lug three other boxes (all possibly with their own PSUs!).
Where is this going? Mobile computing is best served with a laptop, IMHO. The costs for good performance are high, enough so to put off LAN partiers on a budget.
These boxes fill that niche, but I think that this one in particular is crippled too much by the laptop hard drive, slimline CD, less expansion, etc.
If you want an appliance at home, this is no good either. Server? At the moment the max 2.5" HDD is 60 Gigs, I think. and if the machine breaks, you can't just buy another PSU, for example, and slot it in the box - it's all non-standard. Buy a proper server and shove it in a closet, or quieten it down with custom fans and heatsinks.
Other appliances? There are cheaper custom-built mp3 streamers, DVD-recording video recorders, and so on available.
This thing is a no-no, in my opinion.
Note to ACs: I won't mod you up, even if you are being funny or insightful. So take a chance! It's not real life!
Are you sure? I saw many negative points:
"The biggest sacrifice is the use of a 2.5" laptop hard drive. In our particular unit it was an IBM drive spinning at 4500rpm. The use of 2.5" drives keeps the heat, noise and size down however at the same time it also raises the costs and hurts performance."
"One problem with this particular setup is a non back panel case design. Meaning that the case is designed for this particular motherboard (and the two others Lex makes) and those boards only."
"From the looks of the above picture, it looks as if a 3.5" hard drive could be mounted. Unfortuately however, underneath the 2.5" drive is the internal connections for the external power supply."
"In our tests of the PCI riser we ran into a few issues."
"Depending on where you buy, you will likely have to buy a 2.5" hard drive and a slim line CD rom drive. These can be annoying additional costs on hard to come by parts."
The reviewer showed the benefits and limitations equally.
You said arguably the smallest, and I'm gonna argue.
First things first, the Lex system *is* neat because of the socket 370, but it edges out the Via Eden platform in one dimension by 10mm. Doesn't sound like a lot, unless you're making some really cool custom pc's.
In fact, I've built my own router (running Linux of course) in a 1/10th scale Celica using the VIA. 10mm more in either dimension and it wouldn't have fit. In fact, it looks just like the two projects I just now linked.
The via comes in 500 and 866 mhz flavors, and pulls VERY little power resulting in a low heat motherboard/processor solution. There's so little heat, they don't even put a fan on the processor, which is great when you have your 1/10th scale Celica routing your dsl in your living room where you want to hear other people and/or the tv instead of the computer.
So for those needing those extra mhz, the lex looks like a good solution. But for a Linux gateway/router and a couple other applications, the slower C3's do just fine, but pull less power and have the possibility of going completely fan free (if you can find a fan-free powersupply).
With the 533MHz CPU, it needs no CPU fan, and is still plenty zippy for all of your favorite gateway tasks--we use them for web caching, DHCP, DNS caching, masquerading, NATting, routing micro-uber-boxes. Even with all of those services running, these little boxes will push a T1 line chock full of goodness with plenty of power to spare. We'd like it to be even smaller, of course, but I don't think the Lex box in question is the right way for us because we don't want a big hot Intel CPU in there.
We're popping an Intel dual NIC into the PCI slot for the firewall enhanced version (that's three NICs total), giving a nice Internal/DMZ/External separation in a very nice little low-power package.
Anyway, I'm enjoying the relative quiet of these boxes so much, that I'm considering getting an 800MHz one for my desktop machine. All of my real work goes on in the machine closet anyway, so I might as well have some peace, quiet, and an easily moveable machine out here in the civilized part of the office.
You and me both.
Well, in my case it's a Sony HDTV-ready set (though still 4:3 'cause there's so little 16:9 HD stuff broadcast), I have wired the whole house with 2xCat5e and 2xRG6/U, and I too want a central media server, though for movies as well as music (I have about 160 GB of the latter, unompressed). Yes, I have the obligatory DirectTV system with 18"x24" dish and twin dual LNBs, 5x8 multiswitch at the headend, and a terrestrial HD/SD/analog antenna.
I've looked at GCT Allwell's iDVD3036 for a local quiet thin client for an application similar to yours, but there are a few problems, not the least of which is the poor GNU/Linux support for the Sigma Designs em8400 H/W MPEG2 decoder and CyberPro 5005 graphics chip. A proprietary library for the em8400 is available, as well as proprietary X drivers for the CyberPro, but the latter doesn't handle digital overlays and alphablending very well. Register-level documentation is available for both chips, but I lack sufficient video graphics card architecture knowledge to make much sense of it without some kind of tutorial context. About the only nice thing about that combo is the use of digital CCIR601 overlay ports on the CyberPro for the output of the em8400 (and a TV tuner) -- this avoids loss of sharpness due to a more common analog overlay.
Now, what makes this system interesting, is the use of more standard video and the availabiliy of a PCI slot: one could drop a Sigma Designs Netstream 2k in there, and analog overlay the X output. You also get stock composite, svideo, and component outputs from the em8400 directly, so, using multiple inputs on the TV, and an SVGA to svideo converter, go between displaying an X display with a scaled PIP live video image and a full-screen video image, with better resolution (or just get a TV with SVGA-in).
Of course, replacing the slim-line CD drive with a DVD drive, and swapping out the HDD for a DOC would probably be called for.
This leaves the issue of streaming data to the box: does it sport on-board 100 Mb/s ethernet?
You could've hired me.