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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.
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
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.
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!
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.