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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."
Once upon a time people called that a mini tower.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
How can people care so much if their box is all snazzy and fancy, it's the hardware dammit, it's what's on the inside that counts...or atleast that's what I tell myself everytime i look in the mirror...
excuse me, i think i have something in my eye..
Does this mean sneaky little proprietary rails that keep things in by friction, but can never be exchanged with another system.
I hate those things.
The proper way a drive should be secured is with a Phillips screwdriver. It is not like a Phillips Screwdriver is some exotic tool that is hard to come by.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Insert lame joke about said hardware not being able to handle a slashdotting, despite the fact that said hardware is not running the web site.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
I may be blind but I couldn't find the dimensions of this bare-bones unit anywhere in TFA. So then I went to www.shuttle.com, and I couldn't find this particular model anywhere. As the article states, it apparently is not for sale yet. Then I started looking at the specs sheets for the P-series models and couldn't find dimensions there either.
It appears to be bigger than a breadbox to me, and with my total inability to find the dimensions (which are likely on the front page of the article) that description will have to do.
Don't know why they don't mention this things in the article... MirrorDot
Just what we need. PCs labeled as being "bristley".
"I would have loved to buy that powerful Athlon 64, but the system bristled with ports, unlike the smooth surface of my legacy free Mac mini."
Sometimes my arms bend back.
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.
Why is it always a competition?
If you find something that fits you and you're the only person in the world that likes it who cares if it sells 1,000,000 copies or 1, as long as you get what you like.
BTW, Dell will sell more shitty OptiPlex GX280's than Apple will sell mini's. Does it make them better? Or do the specs make the better? Or is it the price that makes it better? The reality is your opinion is what makes something better. Unfortunately you have yet to learn it is only better to you.
I recently built a video acquisition box for work. I wanted the smallest case that could support RAID, a fast processor, and an addon PCI board (the frame grabber). The Shuttle was the perfect choice.
But if I were buying a computer for my wife or kids, the Mac would probably be better.
It all depends on your needs.
You're making an irrelevant comparison.
Shuttle builds components. The SN25P, like all of the XPCs, is simply a custom barebones. It's not intended to compete with the Mac Mini because it's not a complete computer.
If this was an OEM selling full systems built around an XPC, it would be a little more on point... but still not really.
Does the Mac Mini support top of the line processors or external videocards? I think not. I'm a big Mac fan, but you're just trolling.
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jonathan barket
1) it already has integrated 1000bt, unless you want to go 10gbe there's no point.
2) unless you're capturing HDTV resolutions, a firewire capture device will do fine. i'm also unaware of any PCI-66 framegrabber cards that even exist (nor any which would _need_ PCI-66 to function). hell, PCI-33 is even fine for HDTV capture. bonus: you can disconnect the firewire device when not in use, and save power. also saves a slot which can be used for other devices instead.
PCI-66 is also more expensive to design boards for. PCI express is faster and simpler than PCI-66 and cheaper to design for. PCI express connector can also take much less board space, which is a major issue in SFF designs.
when almost all of the devices you would want to use are already integrated onto the motherboard, backwards compat is less of an issue... when I upgraded to my amd64 motherboards I ended up ditching a lot of expansion cards (gigabit, serial ata, firewire), because everything was already integrated.
Adjustable fan speeds, from 800 to 4000 rpm. If you read the article, the volume from the front is 48db, which is fairly impressive. Quieter than the 2nd gen G series Shuttles which I've seen/heard in person.
...how many serial ports does it have?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I have a Shuttle SN95G5. It's very cool and quiet. I've got a Winchester core Athlon 64 3200+, which is supposedly lower power than the older cores. All I know is the machine is fast, cool, and quiet. (Unlike the grandparent post, I have only one hard disk in this machine so I have not seen any cooling issues.)
Inside the Case
Outside the case
Note: excuse my references to the Lanboy. I'm not trying to whore for Antec; it's just that their product is the most readily recognizable example of the design I'm referencing.
During the last two years of college, I got very into the LAN scene. All the guys I worked with were big on LAN gaming, and some people at my apartment complex were into it. Even my girlfriend had her LAN machine (in addition to her art major necessity Mac), which she decorated with Hello Kitty stencils on the requisite LAN computer window and dubbed "Halo Kitty."
We mostly leaned toward aluminum cases for weight benefits coupled with smaller LCDs. Because a fair amount of us were PC repair techs, we'd always have that one slightly older machine that could still easily hang with the games we played. New people would show up, get hooked, and start wanting to build/buy something so that they could participate.
A few people ended up with Shuttles or similar SFF cases. While fairly convenient in size, we consitently saw overheating issues and high noise levels. Shoehorning a good graphics card into these things (since LAN action is obviously a target market) sends heat levels through the roof, and the smaller size means only one fan. The need for a single fan means that fan must turn at very high speeds. This made for some excessive noise levels, especially for people who wanted to use these as their primary computer, and (logically) envisioned setting them atop their desk beside the monitor.
So the question out of all of this is here: are these SFF designs worth it? I love the convenient size of the Mac Mini as much as the next guy, but (in addition to being much smaller than most SFF PCs) they target a totally different market. When I look at these squatty boxes and compare them to an Antec Lanboy or other similar aluminum chassis w/ handles, I start wondering.
Isn't it just smarter to buy a lightweight mini-tower? With space for 3HDDs, isn't that what this thing really is, anyway? A Lanboy comes with a carry strap, weighs less than 20 lbs. loaded with an HDD and optical drive, and avoids the excessive heat and noise levels generated by the SFF design. While a Lanboy might be 2 or 2.5 times taller, it's also skinnier, so we're not talking about a huge gain there. On top of this, I get to choose my own internal components, whereas I was always put off of these because I'd end up having to use a shuttle mainboard.
So SFF buyers, what draws you to these things?
Oxford announced the addition of the word "macmini" to their dictionary which appears to be a unit to measure size and coolness at the same time. Typical examples of its usage are:
- Cool, my new Mac Mini is exactly one macmini
- Duh, my iPod is less than half a macmini
- Who the hell would buy a 10 macminis Shuttle XPC SN25P
- Add a full macmini to your p****, 100% safe!
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.
But, the Mac mini doesn't come with a mouse![!!] So, your USB mouse has infinitely more buttons than the Mac mini's mouse. :)
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is much smaller then micro-ATX, and a complete deferent form factor then anything else.
The reason shuttle is able to make the boxes like they do is not using a standard form-factor. The regular G sized shuttles are close to Flex-ATX, but not quite. This is a bit bigger. Then there is the BTX i Chassis which is really close to the BTX form factor but a good bit bigger then this machine.
where the real difference comes with shuttles is the packaging. You will be very hard pressed to find a micro atx case that is anywhere near this small, and has a CD that isn't vertical mounted, and accepts Full height PCI/AGP cards. Shuttles mean you have no trade offs from normal ATX machines, but they are much smaller.