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Pentium M Goes SFF
Jonesy writes "The folks at The Tech Report have reviewed an interesting new small form factor box (a roughly toaster-sized desktop PC) from AOpen based on the Pentium M. As expected, performance is on par with a Pentium 4, but noise and power consumption are much lower. The reviewer says, 'Subjectively, the EY855-II was simply amazing. At one point, I sat with the system at ear level two feet away. I closed my eyes and strained to hear it, but was unable to do so.' The one fly in the ointment: relatively high prices still on Pentium M processors, although that could change soon."
That thing is a lot of badass electronic-fused-with-acoustic musical stage time.
I'm a musician, and I know I'm getting one for that.
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Sure Macs had the first Small form factor Computer in the G4 Cube, but Shuttle and other PC Case makers have been making much more realistic(buyable) products for awhile now. The only reason Mac has the Mini is becuase of the inroads these other Case makers have been doing.
mnewberg.com
In every environment I've worked in, it has been easy to just position the PC in a way that I can't hear it, even if it is a bit noisy. I, for one, am not willing to pay *any* extra for a quiet desktop. The Mac mini isn't popular because it is quiet, it is popular because it is a practical fashion statement- something Apple is good at.
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if Pentium Ms are similar performance to Pentium 4s, wouldn't it be ideal for clusters and server farms in which (a) density, (b) heat, and (c) power dissipation becomes major factors in day-to-day operations?
Well .. the base Mini Mac is $499 and still needs memory, hard drive, etc also if you want to run OSX with any amount of performance.
.. and it does look like a toaster.
But your right, its nothing more then a "narrow" shuttle
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$325 with or without a processor? Uh... without... hmmm. bit pricey then, especially with the current prices of the 'M' chips.
The other difference is the mini has an old but competant video chipset (Radeon 9200)... the AOpen has "Intel 855GME". Since they didn't even mention it in the review and used an AGP video card, I assume it's not up to much.
Of course it's a lot more expandible. It's really not in the same ballpark as the mini. It's more like a step up from the Cube.
Not sure thats a good thing really, do we really need PS2, serial, parallel and VGA ports on the back ?
Would have been neater to just go fully USB, Firewire and have DVI, ah well.
For its price point and target demographic, the Mac Mini is good to go for 99% of all people.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
The Small Form Factor PC did more to change peoples minds about the size of computers then Apple did with the G4 Cube. When I think of small computer, I think of the Small Form Factor PC developed by Shuttle. I do not think about Mac Mini, or the G4 Cube. The only reason there is a Mac Mini is becuase PC makers showed there was a market for such computers, if they didn't, I feel Apple would just keep on making Imacs.
mnewberg.com
Look around, and only one company has truly done that... Apple with the Mac mini.
Many of the SFF PCs use m-itx, rather than laptop, motherboards and components. As such they use regular desktop CPUs, hard drives, heatsinks, and optical drives.
The Mac mini, however, uses a laptop hard drive, laptop optical drive, a laptop heatsink, and a laptop CPU.
GPL Deconstructed
So, as the review points out that the loudest thing in the system was the video card, are there any current video cards that can be passively cooled? I'd've thought that with PCs becoming 'home entertainment systems' that there'd be more of a move toward fanless/silent systems.
Still isn't what people are looking for. Wintel folks: look to the Mac Mini for inspiration.
- People want good video performance. That means no shared memory for video. The only reason people buy these huge AOpen and Shuttle SFF's is that the Mini-ITX boards are saddled with lousy graphics. Put an ATi Mobility X700 with 128 megs of video memory in there, and customers won't want or need an AGP or PCIE16 slot. Now you can get away with no expansion slots at all.
The solution is staring the industry in the face, but no one seems to sell it: SFF machines built using laptop motherboards. If Dell can sell this for $1,000 why can't they sell the same thing with no display, battery, or keyboard for $500?Entry level computer users? You can buy a similarly equipped Dell for cheaper, WITH a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, AND the operating system that everyone else uses.
Oh, and that's apart from the fact that parent poster is probably right. DOS compatibility isn't a selling point anymore, the huge, bulky white boxes are out, and the maintenance troubles of spyware-plaged W**s systems make many people look for alternatives. From what I know most people do with their PC's, the Mac Mini would make an excellent choice these days.
The most difficult road is the most interesting one.
P6 = Archetecture that PIII, PII and PPro use. No one processor can be quantified as P6. That is why the Pentium M is not a Pentium III is not a Pentium II is not a Pentium Pro. They are simply progress as newer versions of P6.
So if/when you say "they re-released a Pentium 3 as a Pentium M", you are wrong. They took out a schematic for the P6 archetecture (probably the Tualatin's last spec), found a way to add in some of Pentium 4's technology (branch prediction unit update, SSE2, micro-op fusion), some all together new technology (Speedstep 3), and released the Pentium M. To the layman, the former may sound correct, but there's a subtle interpretation difference that makes it sound like they put absolutely no work into the process.
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Don't discount the all-out performance of a Pentium M simply because it was designed for mobile use and consumes very little power. I've seen a few gaming benchmarks that showed the Pentium M can keep up with an Athlon 64 pretty well, the difference was no more than five percent. Side-by-side, few gamers would be able to tell the difference unless there was a meter saying what the FPS was.