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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."
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..
I have a mini tower.
This is significantly smaller.
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.
Mini tower, indeed. It's a *bit* shorter than my last mini tower, but barely qualifies as SFF, IMHO.
And, what the hell is with the Mac Mini comparison?
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
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
I don't understand the comparison between this and a Mac Mini. Fair enough, they try to be small form factor computers, but the end is surely different. the Mac Mini is designed to be a small, neat, consumer electronics device. Essentially a computer that is as easy to use as a DVD player.
The Shuttle is designed to be an expandable PC that has lots of flexibilty and can be modified by changing components so that it can fit the user's needs.
If the Mini does everything you need, buy a Mini. If you need flexibilty or expandablility, buy the Shuttle.
Just because they both try to be small, it doesn't mean that they are necessarily comparable.
In my (admittedly fairly worthless) opinion, the summary was using Mac Mini as a comparison just to make the front page.
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 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.
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.
...how many serial ports does it have?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
It's the best comparision since Libraries of Congress for data storage and transfer.
Example 1: My new server is as tall as 8 mac minis, 4 minis wide, 3 minis thick, and 80 mac minis loud.
Example 2: My new USB mouse has 3 mac mini mouse's worth of buttons.
Welcome to the brave new world of indirect measurement.
SAILING MISHAP
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.