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Small Form Factor Comparison Matrix
Giggles Of Doom writes "With small form factor PCs, such as the Shuttle XPC line, becoming all the rage these days for office and gamer use, it can be a daunting task to find the model that is right for you. With more and more manufacturers getting on the SFF bandwagon, the selection is growing rapidly. How do you compare each one? You could spend hours combing manufacturer sites and reviews, or you could be thankful that someone has done all the work for you already! The Small Form Factor Comparison Matrix is just that, a chart listing over 30 of the most popular SFF boxes, their features, and price. Sort by any field, and limit your search to things like "Pentium 4 Only" or "Under $200 Only." If you're looking into getting a SFF box, this is the place to start." (Sudhian Media and mini-itx.com are also good sources for information on small PCs.)
small form factor will raise the importance of un highly undervaluated aspect: noise
when you sit just beside your pc you soon start striving for finding a noiseless pc (that mostly mean a fanless pc)
There's no column for noise. I know some people who have Shuttle XPCs. Whenever I see them I think "Wow, how cute and practical!" Then they turn it on. WHOOOOOOOOOSH like a jet turbine.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
I thank the site for their good work.
My future SFF will go in a den where I want to keep the noise level down. Too bad there isn't a sound rating on these boxes. I do hear the shuttles are pretty quiet if you use a quiet HD and video card.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
is small form factor. Yet the whole chart gives no indication of size. Just features. If one is to say, find the smallest case, one must click on the detail matrix to drill down. A timely task At least replace one category for a one look size comparison, perhaps the number of floppy bays can go, as this is down on my list of 'must have' case design.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
The Matrix shows a number for USB ports, but it needs to break down which devices have USB 1.1 and which have USB 2. This is extremely important, since you're not likely to have the space to add a USB 2 card.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I would like some desktop motherbords that supports the mobile cpus from intel and amd. Prefably with olny a large heatsink. Does anyone know if there are any makers of those?
To be really useful, this matrix needs a lot of additional information. I was looking a a small form factor case at tiger a couple of weeks ago, and there were a number of suprises you wouldn't realize just by looking at a chart. For example, while the tiger box has a PCI slot and an AGP slot, the positions were reversed. That maters, if you had intended to use a Nvidia card with the fan that takes up the PCI space (wouldn't work in this space). However, the tiger box did have an option (availability unknown) for a printer port connector, which is not mentioned here. And while everyone seems to be doing 6 channel audio (I find that hard to believe for these small boxes) I would like to know if any have game connectors, which have a serial connector, if the keyboard and mouse must be USB, and if any have a DVI connector for a LCD or if all just use an old VGA connector.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
It's difficult to get proper cooling for dual systems (Opterons in particular) in 1U. You can't just go and buy a case, mobo and stuff in two blowers and heat sinks and expect it to work in your rack running 24/7/365.
The owls are not what they seem
You're close, I'm 25. And oddly enough they aren't just giving me bandwidth for free. But if you want to use the site to save yourself time choosing a box, then consider that time savings to be worthless, feel free not to donate. If, on the other hand, it helps you find a box you like with minimal fuss and hassle and are feeling generous, feel free to chip in a buck for hosting costs, pizza costs, etc.
Plus, I felt the donation system would be a lot nicer then ads.
"A coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one."
Buy a commodity dell optiplex gx270 in SFF or even USFF (which mounts behind a flatscreen). As you expect with dell: very good engineering, always leading features and options, great support, etc. Buy from dell outlet and you get a reconditioned box (a couple of months old) still with complete warranty and couple of hundred dollar discount to the off-the-floor price. (Kind of equivalent to buying a car that's only 3 months old).
The noise you are hearing is almost certainly coming from your computer's speakers. What you are probably hearing is power supply noise. On the laptop, you are probably screwed (no space to fix it). On the ITX machine, you might be able to locate the power lines running to your sound card and isolate them a little better (get an EE friend to look at it).
Mute your sound out to see if the sound persists through that.
You might also try turning down the passthrough volume on some of your other sound inputs, like your CD passthrough. I know I had bad bleed through of powersupply noise on one of my systems through that input (same goes for any other sound input).
read through the projects section on mini-itx, there's some great cases, and the best ideas get picked up and made into products. Hush PC makes some nice ones, for instance.
One of the nice things about mini-itx is that its cheap enough that you can rethink decisions. For instance, I spent around $360 on this project ( http://www.monkeynoodle.org/comp/chihiro), $30 of which was the case and shipping for the case. It's okay, but I'm thinking about a better case setup already. If and when I move it into a better case, I'll be out $30, not the hundred or so that a full-tower case costs, and I'll have a few dinky scraps of plexiglass to dispose of, not a massive metal box.
If the dang things had decent Linux video support, I'd buy a ton more of them. As soon as the XFree86 project has the drivers stabilized, look for VIA's stock price to jump :-)
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
I didn't realize how easy it is to actually pay someone with paypal. I have ~30 dollars languishing uselessly in my Paypal account. This guy wanted a meager 1 USD so I clicked on the little paypal icon and in literally 3 clicks the deal was done. This is how the web should work. Better yet, take 1 penny out of my Paypal account every time I visit your site 5 times in a week. After a good slashdotting that guy would get a nice bone for his work and I would make back my contribution many times in Yahoo! stock appreciation.