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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."
The small form factor Pentium 4 is a great idea, but think about: Are the really able to fit all the goods into it? It may make a nice portable system, but when it comes down to it, an Mini-ITX board will be just as function(mostly), and be MUCH cheaper.
Anyways, I'm an Athlon kind of guy.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
I wonder how hot it gets. I didn't find any information about that.
Set these up in cubicles outfitted with mouse, keyboard and displays. People can work at any desk at any time, even in a conference room. And take it home and keep working! An exec's dream come true. I would say it could use some type of built-in display, maybe one of those new foldable displays we heard about yesterday.
One possible reason why Microsoft has a bad reputation (from the IWILL website):
"The Microsoft Jet database engine stopped the process because you and another user are attempting to change the same data at the same time."
I'm glad Jet is at least honest about why it isn't a real database.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Reading from the review, (which hasnt yet been slashdotted) they did the same thing I did when I made a briefcase computer. That is, make a hole right above the CPU fan and have it blow out. The powersupply looks incredibly wimpy so it is doubtful that it would generate that much heat. Also, from the looks of it, the AC to DC conversion doesnt take place on the actual powersupply. There's probably a separated power brick for it. Thus, the only heat-producing component in there of any relevance would be the CPU.
/ProductDetail.asp?vID=179
/. automatically tracked hits to articles.
o re everything linked in a submission.
1. ASP
2. Hammering a database
My guess is there's no caching or anything enabled either.
You know what would be nice, is if
It could do this easily by automatically inserting something like:
http://www.slashdot.org/countHits.pl?
bef
Not highly useful, I know... but don't you wonder sometimes just how many hits it takes before it stops responding all together?
no comment
I noticed that it only comes with a 90W power supply. I don't think that is going to work very well, with a P4 consuming upwards of 70W or more of power. How will there be anything left to run the disk drives, video, etc.?
It may be a little larger, but the Pundit case from ASUS is a heck of a lot more stylish and is still smaller than most of the other small form factor cases.
Actually both serial and paralell ports are easily available as USB adapters. I support a printer, and have supported a palm Vx with appropriate adapters.
The price of the adapters, when compared to the added space on the motherboard that the interface would take up, may very well be worth it.
-Rusty
You never know...
This is true enough, but running an old OS just so you can have a shoe box-sized PC seems like a rather arse-about-face logic to me.
By the way, I'd love one of the PCs :-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
A friend of mine has something like this. It is a great thing to take to a LAN since it is so portable and can hold a ton of data. He has a 240 GB drive in it and he shares games, movies, etc. But you are probably right, this won't take over the market...though it may be time for desktops to get smaller.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
With a P4 in that little case, they have to push a lot of air, so this thing will be loud. What they need is:
- Add a second ethernet port, so this can be used as a home gateway/firewall/proxy/etc.
- Use a cooler CPU, such as a Pentium-M (used in the Centrino chipset), VIA C3, Transmeta. Depending on the CPU, it could potentially be fanless.
At my last job, this computer would have been perfect - not for workstations, but for a project we worked on.
:(
We wrote content management/distrobution software for advertising companies, and got pulled into doing work with the hardware as well. A 1U rack mount computer was hooked to the back of a plasma screen, and plugged into a modem or a network, then we could update on the fly and run any kind of media that the computer could display. We added touch screen overlays to make them interactive. It was a cool project to work on.
The project failed because of the poor quality computer we used -- we were locked into using the 1 brand of computer that was custom designed to mount on the back of a plasma screen.
This would have been an ideal computer for us.
One of the saving graces of these newer "teeny" PC's is the fact that they use 1/5th the power a regular clone uses. If you take last years' PC and 21 inch monitor... you are gobbling up arounf 650 to 700 watts of power ... today, a 17 inch flat panel, and a small- low power consumption pc will use a maximum of 100-120 watts. a MAJOR savings in power.
now this may mean nothing to you and your $100.00+ a month electrical bill, but to people trying to live off grid on solar and wind power or simply trying to be as efficient as possible... these things are a godsend.
and I think a middle ground is needed. we need decent speed, low power computers that will take a Geforce 4ti in it for decent gaming.... the shuttle boxes give me that and if you do it right, you can get in under 290 watts with one.
It's interesting what happens when using another 900 watts in your entire household can cost you an extra $6000.00 in storage, inverter and solar elements... you watch very closely what kind of power consumption versus useability your electronics have.
I just wisk shuttle would make a low-power version... that uses the Pentium4M processor or an AMD that doesnt double as the toaster-oven heating element.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And in small form factor, what would you like to loose to include physical interfaces for the legacy serial ports?
I grant you that if I wanted to have more than six USB ports I would need to add another USB controller. And yes it would cost more than $2.20.
I still contend that USB ports will provide me with the capability of supporting far more than physical serial and paralell interfaces in significantly less space.
Since a single legacy serial interface with an integrated 16550afn UART has a maximum speed of 115kbps, (aprox) and a USB1.1 has a 12Mbps speed and I can fit two USB ports in the space of a single db9 serial, or even a single ps/2 port.
Note I am not telling you to give up on physical serial interfaces if you choose to include them in your design. I am simply saying that if you are attempting to build an extreamly small platform, (which admittedly will probably cost more than a mini-ITX based system) you get more bang for your buck to use USB ports rather than legacy Serial and Paralell ports. If you only include six USB ports, you can sell Paralell and Serial adapters, at a significant mark-up, to those customers who find a need for those interfaces.
Then again, that's just my opinion. You are welcome to hold your own.
-Rusty
You never know...
Have any of you seen the Motorola MW800. It's smaller. http://ruggedpower.motorola.com Not only that but it's completly ruggedized. It's completly water proof, has a thick aluminum case. I drove my sisters Jeep over an eval I had. The mother boards only about 4inches by 6inches, with an integraded power. They told me it was the worlds smallest P4 motherboard. It has a 3D shock mounted HD with a heater to heat the HD during extreme cold. P4 1.7Ghz, 2.4 coming. Includes the following integraded. 1 gig ram 40 gig HD Video caputre w digital VCR Firewire USB Bluetooth PCMCIA WLAN Wideare network support, GPRS, iDEN, CPDP Etc GPS 10/00 Built in power supply with sorts of portection. The back of the unit also has an AUX port for GPIO and will provid 5 and 12V regulated power to external devices. Supports dual digital/analog display
I'm sick of these small yet proprietary mini ITX boxes. Yes, they're small, but you can't put much in them. Read the review, he couldn't even put in a corsair 512MB DIMM because the heat spreader made contact with the chassis?space? That's CRAMPED.
My box is 5.5" by 11.5" by 11.5", houses a 300W power supply INSIDE IT (not externally, ala ZPC), can handle any standard micro atx formfactor motherboard, as much RAM as I want, a full size AGP videocard, etc. It will hold whatever hard drive and CDROM I want...Oh, and it weighs less than the ZPC since it's aluminum. I have expandability and as much power as I want. Did I mention the geargrip for small PCs works beautifully with this?
Intel and AMD swear up and down that I MUST use some 350-400W PSUs that generate heat like they were mini fission plants and sound like a 747 sitting under my desk. Bah.