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Shrinking the PC is a Zen Thing
TheRaindog writes "Tech Report has one of the first reviews of Shuttle's new "Zen" small form factor system, which is almost 20% smaller than current XPCs. The Zen uses a passively-cooled external power supply and variable speed cooling fan to keep the system's noise levels and footprint to a minimum. With support for the latest Pentium 4 processors and ATI's Radeon 9100 IGP chipset, performance isn't too shabby, either."
Replying to my own post its for the external PSU
Rus
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If you want to bring out your system with a bang... you better get some better looking models than this one.
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AC
Except that every desktop Apple currently sold has AGP, Serial ATA, and RAID capabilities.
I could really do with a small PC with a decent graphics card. Considering this has perfectly adequate network, sound and usb, I don't really have a need for a PCI slot for a while.
I guess it's the next size up for me.
How about reading the article? The power supply is external, making the case smaller. The power supply is also passively cooled, making the thing quieter as well.
Someone has actually done this - the January 2004 issue of Maximum PC showed a woman who had modded a computer and a fishtank together into a single unit. It was really quite cool.
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Umm, no they didn't. Remember that big white thing you had to plug into the wall and the cube? That was the power supply.
My other car is first.
Amen. Half the reason to buy something this small is for the mobility it allows - I would love something like that to take to LAN parties. Make a model with a 9600 - hell, you can downgrade the main CPU if you have to to put that in there - and I'll be interested.
I mean, think: LAN partiers are probably the people who move their desktop PCs around the most - other people who want a mobile PC get a laptop. So, why is it so hard to find small form-factor gamer PCs? With LCD's now, the monitor is no longer the big space-hog when it comes to moving the gear out - its the friggin case, which is mostly empty space - but if you look for a nice small cube or rack mount, inevitably you find that it has a POS onboard video adn no AGP slot.
Don't forget you need to buy the processor, RAM, and harddrive(s) (plus mouse, keyboard, etc), which add to the toal cost. Shuttle does offer some bundled stuff. I recently bought a Shuttle SB61G2R that I've been very pleased with, and it came with a DVD-ROM, memory card reader, wireless built-in, and even a shoulder bag to tote it around. It runs pretty quiet, although not silent, and I get a lot of compliments about the look of it.
Although my system has the same footprint as a (mini-)tower, the low height does make a difference in appearance, especially on a small desktop workspace. I still have a lot of cables in the back, but I don't think I can avoid that with a different case, either.
Would this be a bad time to mention Shuttle's based in Taiwan? Or that official estimates are that about 24% of Taiwanese are Buddhists?
...and while I'm looking at building a new box in the next few months, one option I've ruled out are these small form factor PCs.
I built my SFF system about a year and a half ago. It's a Shuttle SS51G; the first XPC they offered with an AGP slot. At the time, it seemed like a great idea: it was small, quiet, attractive, and wasn't hideously expensive, and it would allow me to have plenty of power to run Dark Age of Camelot (which was the only game I played at the time). This was especially true in light of the fact that the whole reason I was building a new PC was because my incredibly large, hot, and noisy beige box AMD system had decided to destroy itself after AMD's 'recommended' fansink died only 6 months after being installed.
The problems I've had with heat in my Shuttle, however, have been even more irritating. Those, coupled with some of the other minor annoyances from the XPC line (which I'd assume are really problems of all SFF systems) have turned me away from them.
First and foremost, I've had major heating issues. The review sites, like Ars and [H] were right when they said that Shuttle's ICE cooling system (a heatpipe, really) was quiet and kept the processor running reasonably cool. The problem is that I automatically assumed that meant that the case itself had adequate cooling, and quite honestly, it doesn't.
My first heat-related issue was with my video card; a Radeon 8500. The AGP slot in Shuttle's cases is literally right next to the case wall. I honestly can't imagine there's more than a 1/4 of an inch between the case and the fan on my Radeon 8500, which means the thing can barely breathe. I've had to underclock it to maintain stability.
Second, I had issues with the RAM causing heat build-up, too. The system defaults to a speed of DDR200, even though the mainboard supposedly supports up to DDR333. I have a pair 512 MB DDR266 sticks from Crucial; both identical. When I changed the multiplier to force them to run at DDR266, I noticed I would get more crashes and lockups, and I wasn't even running an aggressive timing configuration. Ultimately, I had to back my RAM down to DDR200.
The worst part about the heat-related issues is that there's really nothing to do about it. There's no room for expansion in the case; it's not like you can just stick another fan in there. There's barely any room for the components that're already in the case.
Other minor annoyances I've come across are the excessively spartan BIOS, and complete inability to do any work inside the case without disassembling the whole damned thing.
Don't get me wrong, Shuttle doesn't make a bad product. My XPC has great construction quality, and was rather reasonably priced. But despite their claims that these systems offer gaming-quality performance, they really don't. And they're barely any more upgradeable than a laptop.
I'd recommend one to anyone who wants a good web browser or maybe to put together a media box or some sort of small server, but for any performance-intensive, stay away.
You mean like the "Cool 'n Quiet" feature of the Athlon 64, where it slows down when not under load?
The Apple G5's do this, as well as most mobile CPU's. The VIA C3's and Transmeta CPU's also can do this.
I don't think the P4's have this capability. They will slow the system down when it reaches a temperature threshhold, to keep it from frying itself. Is that what you were referring to?
Hopefully Intel will catch up on this with their next processor release. It's a great feature for home servers, which are lightly loaded most of the time. Or, even for workstations.. I don't need a lot of CPU to browse the web and respond on slashdot.
I just purchased a Shuttle SK41G and I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of noise. A very quiet whirr of the fan and that's it, very unlike the 747 takeoff noise that my previous computer generated. At the office I keep some music on quietly and I can't hear the fan. The grinding of the hard drive is actually more noticeable. Before this case I didn't even know my hard drive made noise :)
Anyway I'm pretty happy with it, but that's only one opinion.
To cool the cpu it uses a "heatpipe" system. Here's some pictures of the case and the internals.
If you put plenty of RAM in the system, you can run a linux CD distribution like KNOPPIX and eventually all your frequently used stuff will be in RAM cache.
CD-ROMs tend to be really quiet and reliable, so this may be a potential solution.
-Z
Silent? How about overheated?
well, I sysadmined for a company that had 4 cubes, and 3 of those cracked in the same year because of internal heat.
And trust me, it's a well known problem
I'm a man that believes in objectivity. The little rendering farms I set up out of old PCs, network cable and FreeBSD allowed that company to do video renderings for about 1/8 of buying a Mac system. Yeah, it looked like hell to a graphic designer, and it was noisy. But surprisingly, the electric costs were about the same. And did I mention 1/8 price?
Looks are for superficial people. Go worship your Macs. I'll buy a Mac when it's worth the money.
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Don't these things make noise like a vacuum cleaner?
Depends on what you do with it. I have two Shuttle SB61G2 systems at home (P4 based), and one SB51G at work. These are a little older models - early 2003 for the SB61s and late 2002 for the SB51.
The SB51 at work runs a P4 2.8GHz (the older 533 bus), and it spends most of its time idling. Given that, it runs with -very- little noise. Occasionally I run big computational jobs on it, which get the cooler fan going a bit, but even then its quiet (the HP-UX box 6ft away on the far side of the desk easily drowns out its noise, whereas the SB51 sits just a couple feet away).
At home the SB61s run 3GHz P4s. These get hot under load. One of them runs Fedora, with seti@home jobs running 24/7. Its fan is always maxed out. Shuttle ships their boxes with Sunon fans, and they are loud at full speed (in the 40 to 50dB range I think). However I swapped it for a lower rpm, quieter fan. At idle its almost inaudible, however since it runs at full load always, I'm guessing mabye mid-30s dB wise. Its not loud, but I'm still considering ways on making it quieter. One thing I plan to do is swap the power supply in it. The older models like I have came with relatively noisy power supplies, however the new generation XPCs (the G4 ones) supposedly come with newer SilentX powersupplies that are much quieter. They match the form factor of the old ones, so I'll probably pick up some of those and swap them out.
Btw - the other SB61 at home is the gaming rig. It has a more powerful AGP-based graphics card in it, but the downside is the fan on the card is probably the dominant noise source. Although the XPC supports the very hot, very loud graphic cards, if you want quiet you'll want to pick something a couple steps back from the leading edge.
Er, this eMac I'm sitting in front of (brand new, bought about a month and a half ago) has no AGP (slot, although I'm sure the video card uses AGP technology), serial ATA, or RAID (except if you buy it an XServe RAID, which would be really really really cool).
You might be thinking of the G5, which is a bad ass machine and has all those features, but that's not Apple's only desktop computer.
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