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Athlon 64 SFF With PCI Express Reviewed
EconolineCrush writes "The Tech Report has an in-depth review of Shuttle's new XPC SN25P. At several times the size of a Mac Mini, the SN25P is an entirely different breed of small form factor system; one that supports one 5.25" drive, three 3.5" drives, PCI Express x16 graphics cards and x1 peripherals, up to 2GB of DDR400 memory, and Socket 939 Athlon 64 processors. The system also bristles with USB, Firewire, and audio ports, including digital S/PDIF inputs and outputs, and even has an integrated memory card reader. Looks like a pretty good balance between footprint, portability, and expansion capacity."
I have a mini tower.
This is significantly smaller.
Don't know why they don't mention this things in the article... MirrorDot
I have the previous-generation Shuttle AMD64 model - the SN95 - and I must say that even with two 3.5" drives, cooling them can be a problem.
So even though it has 3 3.5" slots you'd probably be better off putting in at most two drives and investing in heat sinks for them.
Without additional cooling, even with one hard drive I had to set the fan to 'medium', up from 'Smart fan' to avoid overheating within a few hours.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
The P series Shuttles all come with 350W power supplies. Pretty much neccesary for a power hungry PCIe graphics card, 3 hard drives, optical drive, etc.
... the far less power hungry Athlon64 should be even better off.
There is a 350W P series with a Prescott P4 that works just fine
Note that PCI-X != PCIe. PCI-X is the 133MHz PCI derivative which is backwards compatible with 66mhz and 33mhz cards, whereas PCIe is the not backwards compatible serial link PCI. One PCIe slot/lane has a transfer rate of ~250MB/s (2x PCI). You can easily add mroe lanes to each slot. So with graphics, you have 16 PCIe lanes at 250MB/s each.
I think that was just because the Mac mini has been getting a lot of press lately, so it's a familiar comparison point, and also because the Mac mini truely is SFF.
For those of you looking for dimensions, the review lists them as: 325mm x 210mm x 220mm. The article also shows a picture of it next to the smaller original G series case.
I noticed your later post clarifing your confusiong PCI-X and Express.
At any rate, there are a number problems with PCI-X:
1) It's a parallel protocol. That means that all the traces for it need to be the same length to make it work properly. Makes motherboard design tricky.
2) The connectors are HUGE. You have to make a quite physically large card to accomadate that, even if the electronics don't justify it. ESpically a problem in small cases.
3) The electronics necessary to implement it are more expensive than PCIe.
4) There's no real expansion path to it. There isn't any plans for how ot scale it in speed that wouldn't require a reworking and probably add more complexity.
PCIe is real nice because in it's slowest implementation, 1x, it is still fast (about the same speed as PCI-66) but takes a very small slot with very few traces. Nice and cheap to implement, and easy to stick in small cases. However it scales real easily, you can whack on more lanes to a slot, and you can have multiple slots with lots of lanes. So on a low end board with integrated graphics you can have a couple 1x slots, on a workstation barod a 16x, a 14 and a number of 1xs and on a highernd server or visualtion board, multiple 16xs.
Also since you can have more than one 16x slot, unlike with AGP which is single slot only, you can have multiple high power grapihcs accelerators in a system that supports it.
Like with Serial ATA, it is a technology that's needed to keep scaling well and to simplify things. Yes, right now there's really no performance reason to go SATA over PATA, however there will be soon, and SATA should keep scaling. Plus the smaller, simpler connectors are a real boon in many applications.
Also PCIe is compatible with PCI in the fact taht you can have PCI slots on a PCIe motherboard without any problems. So you get a PCIe board and you can still use your old cards, then you slowly replace them as technology progresses, and eventually ouy just don't need it anymore.
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