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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."
I've attended the Seattle Folk Festival many times and often wondered, "When are they going to get mobile processors here?"
I'm a big tall mofo.
Crow T. Trollbot
I had a processor make exactly the same sound once. Usually after they go 'sfff' they're pretty much dead.
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.
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
The Pentium One Thousand!!!! We'll sell you the whole processor, but you'll only need the edge.
I'm looking at the pictures, and so far I see a system with more beef than a Mac Mini (2 DIMM slots instead of 1, etc), maybe a little bigger and more expensive. But quieter and less powerful than a loaded Shuttle.
So somewhere in between the two, then.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Wow, it looks exactly like a shuttle with a different front panel...very interesting.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Interesting that they are still bothering with PS/2 for keyboard and mouse. I just got a new Dell at work. No PS/2, just 8 USB 2.0 ports.
they've overhyped the Pentium 4 for 4+ years, and underhyped the Pentium III. The P3 was a far better chip, and still is. That's why they re-released it as the M.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
They claim the computer is almost silent, so much in fact he could barely hear it from two feet away from the ears.
My question is then if he has bad hearing. Because any harddisk and the PSU fan will be hearable!
And it will look just like a toaster. But I guess if you really wanted to make toast, you'd have to use the Prescott instead of the M.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
AOpen has had a microATX 855 chipset board for a little while but really the Pentium M is the perfect fit for SFF computers so I am not complaining.
The 855 chipset is a little dated though, not great for gaming. I wonder how well supported it is in Linux.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
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.
A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.
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?
As a PC user for 9 years, and a Mac user for 5 years before that. I can say that I have yet to see an offering of the quality of Apple, nor have i seen an SFF box for a similar price with opperating system included.
As an AOpen customer I reccomend agaist any product of theirs that cannot be self serviced, as AOpen has had poor relations with resellers and endusers. My current laptop and dealings with AOpen have lead to now 7 months of no solution to my problems, initially the firewire port broke which was not a problem as I do very little editing, then a key fell off the laptop keyboard, and now the screen mount is broken at the point where the LCD meets the laptop, attempts to open or close the screen damage the laptop casing.
I attempted to go through my reseller only to find that they were sued by the California Better Business Bureau for fraud and were no longer in business. AOpen provided no option for repair and has ceased to return communications.
That said, I do know people who have had success with cases by AOpen, however I have yet to talk with anyone who has had success dealing with AOpen for customer service, including retailers.
... should be interesting, there's at least a Tyan board (K7M that handles AMD's low power K7 chip. It's socket A with DDR333 memory.
This mobo is purely a microformat web/mail/office unit, no AGP or PCIe, but it could make a pretty slick little microserver or homebrew blade..
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.
Looking for "a roughly toaster-sized desktop PC"? Look no further than IntelliToast!
SFF in this context is a speed measure. Pentium M goes So Fucking Fast.
Companies hype small form-factor Desktop PCs or Thin Blade Servers as if they invented something new. All it is, is a laptop in a new package. That is why the prices are high.
What the companies do is take out the Pentium M motherboard and other small components from a notebook, dump the LCD and then package it all in a small thin box and call it the latest, greatest thin desktop/blade server.
Some day they'll figure out a way to make processors survive 310+ farenheit, then we'll have real toasting machines.
Bacardi + slashdot = negative karma.
The one who make good sff computer. Either good looking or good performance.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
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.
The minute they cancelled Itanium's whole branch
Sorry, but the Itanium2 is alive and well, though relegated to a relatively small market.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
I can just imagine it turning bright yellow and crackling with electricity. Actually...thats what happened when I spilled orange juice on my processor one time...that's not so cool.
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I have a totally silent fanless/diskless machine at work and it's so quiet that i can hear everyone in the adjoining offices. Kinda like having my laptop for a bit of background noise.
Now it'd be nice to have a silent system at home, but i usually have music on when i'm working so either way it's good.
You may think of the Shuttle. I think of the G4 Cube(which was first, and proved the concept worked). All of this is irrelevant. How much time did either get in the normal press?
Fact of the matter is the Mac mini will be credited with bring small form factor to the AVERAGE consumer.
As for AOpen's execution...Kevin Rose proved a SFF x86 machine could happen in a case the size of the mini(minus an optical drive). Until someone comes out with something that small and pretty with an x86-based processor, "nothing to see hear...move along".
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?By small form factor...do you mean, laptop?
Score: -1, Redundant; that's for the machine boys, not the comment.
Even blind squirrels find nuts now and then.
If laptop parts come down some in price (more than this), and folks are willing to pay the difference to have quiet, smaller, cheaper to run machines, we could see an interesting trend over the next couple of years.
Laptop and desktop parts could converge, leaving what we currently think of as desktop parts (and their like) in the server realm. Meaning we might have a little burp in Moore's law (that the average macine bought in 2006 will be SLOWER than the average one bought in 2005) and the number of hefty CPUs sold would drop, so that the prices of them (therefore) would go up (or fail to come down as we have come to expect).
It'd be good for America's energy bill, but bad for gamers, and those of us who make servers at home with commodity parts.
I would've thought a review of a SFF system would tell how small it is. Am I blind or did they not list the dimensions in the entire 13 pages?
If that thing asks me if I'd like some toast, I'm going to take an axe to it...
Yes, there are women on Slashdot. Deal with it.
And apart from the processor, there's nothing really new in this thing.
Someone's finally invented a notebook computer without an integrated keyboard and LCD panel?
The hell you say!
Well maybe your friends shouldn't be such numpties!
.. a Mac Mini is a computer, with it you can do all sorts of things including but not limited to :
:
...
Just to help them (and you) out
- Wordprocessing
- Spreadsheets
- E-mail
- Internet
- Photo manipulation
- Video editing
- Play games
- Hold down paper in high wind areas
Things a Mac Mini probably can't do
- Give you oral sex
- Cook your dinner
- Tidy your room
- Think up good excuses as to why you are so stupid
- Protect your from a nuclear winter
- Stop numptyism.
I'm intrigued, please ask your friends what they expected the Mac to do after they'd bought it
It's worth comparing this box with some of the Pentium M machines/barebone systems available based on miniITX motherboards with integrated video and no AGP. If you're not doing 3-D gaming, then these guys are very attractive.
In particular, look at some of the designs coming out of Soldam, such as the Alphia, Lepty and Rhapsody.
On the other hand, if you're looking for 3-D gaming with the best performance in the smallest possible package, it's hard to go past something like Iwill's ZPC64.
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.
That's about a quarter the size of a microwave oven, kiddies.
It looks like Tech Report is guilty of benchmark fiddling. If you look closely, this PC is using an nVidia 6800, which makes it completely unfair to compare to a Mac mini, which sports a smaller ATI 9200.
I don't know - a smallish PC based upon the Pentium M, as opposed to the outdated G4, where I can use a fast 3.5" desktop drive, the AGP video card of my choice, optical audio in/out, and an extra PCI slot is kind of exciting. The Mac Mini is a great machine, but some people care about other things as well.
The Pentium M is basically a "boosted" Pentium !!! : more cache, new optimisation-oriented features
Plus SSE2, 400MHz FSB. other than that, it's a P3.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
As we can see here...
The Pentium M is basically a "boosted" Pentium !!! : more cache, new optimisation-oriented features.
Add SSE2, and clock the FSB to 400MHz, and vee-olah! Pentium M!
It's a tweaked P3, and there's no denying it.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
I'm not going to qoute the entire 21 page article from Anandtech, but the conclusion was pretty clear.
Basicly, the summary is that mobile chips are often limited by memory bandwidth etc. The Pentium M is stunning, and an even match for PIV/A64 under those conditions, and with lower power consumption to boot. But when you remove the constraints and move to a desktop, it does not perform as well as the desktop chips. E.g. it has a large cache to deal with a slow memory bus. Give it DDR400 (or soon, DDR2-667) and the big cache is excessive.
The Pentium M was Intels attempt to make AMD fight a two-front war against a superior mobile and superior desktop CPU. They succeeded in mobile chips because they made adaptions specifically for the mobile market, but failed on the desktop. I expect the same choices to hold it back when going for the desktop market.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I've always liked the idea of a SFF PC. Who needs a huge mini-tower case when all you need is one 3.5" drive and one 5.25"?
I've used the mini-itx boards such as the VIA Eden but they're too slow for any serious work. Of course there's the shuttles but with all that gear in a small space with a roasting processor, the cooling they require means they're always too noisy.
We know it can be done because Apple have done it, but in the PC world we've always been waiting for a powerful laptop processor in a SFF case. So this one looks like a toaster, someone will take the idea and build a better looking one!
...It looks like those very small "breadbox" case designs for PC compatibles that has been around for a couple of years.
In short, it's not even anywhere close to being inspired by the Mac Mini.