World's Smallest Desktop Pentium4?

Valour writes "The Jem Report has just published an in-depth review and installation guide for the new Iwill ZPC, a cool little Pentium4 ultra small formfactor PC. There have been similar designs in the past, but nothing with this kind of power."

Comments

Sorry to be negative, but ...

[Mostly a lurker]

... I really do not understand what the niche for this might be. Notebook class performance, notebook level pricing, less portable than a notebook (when you consider the need for a monitor also) and no more configurable.

I own a Shuttle. It is more expensive than the cheapest desktops and less portable than a notebook, but it has real desktop performance in a reasonably portable form factor. That makes sense to me.

Re:Still, a serial port, and PS/2!

[toddestan]

The reason they carry it on is that people want it and need it. Serial is hardly useless, it is needed for older (but not that old) devices like Palms and HP Calculators. Also, the best modems generally are external that use serial ports.

Older printers (and some new ones) still use parallel ports.

PS/2 is hardly dead either. PS/2 keyboards just work. They have ironed out most of the bugs with USB keyboards, but you still have minor issues with Linux, old dos stuff, etc. Besides, all the good keyboards are either PS/2 or even the old AT style plug. USB keyboards are crap. Bottom line is, I better be able to hook up my Model M's to any computer I buy.

Pentium M?

[bedizened]

I'm surprised at what appears to be a complete lack of small/quiet desktop systems using the new Pentium M, or even the entire Centrino chipset.

It seems like the Pentium M, even on a laptop motherboard, would be the ideal way to make an extremely small, fanless (at least for the 7W version of the chip) pc.

Has anyone seen something like this? Would it be difficult to make one?

Re:Chilling

[TheViffer]

This is marked as funny, but is it?

Look at today, we air blast our cases for cooling. Some of the daring will use water, even others liquid nitrogen.

But think about it, we are clearly in the stone ages when it comes to effective computer cooling. This not only is in how we cool the equipment, but in how that equipment is designed.

Don't laugh when in five years, some company like "Coleman" is making the worlds most advanced "desktop and workstation" cases employing refrigeration and insulation.