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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
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
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.
SFF in this context is a speed measure. Pentium M goes So Fucking Fast.
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.
Only if you have a loud PSU or harddisk. In my own system, there's 3 noise sources, in order: CPU cooler, PSU fan and harddisk. The latter is a single-platter, single head, liquid bearings, recent Seagate model. These are very quiet. And mounted on rubber vibration-dampers, almost inaudible. PSU fan speed is varied depending on load, and mostly very quiet too. Its noise only goes up during long compile jobs or 3D gaming. In the latter case, it doesn't matter anyway, since the noise of exploding rockets is more interesting. ;-))
So yes, pick your components carefully, and you can make a PC practically silent.
Anyway, I would welcome it if some manufacturers would put their heads together, and standardise some things on SFF PC's, like mainboard size, CPU location etc. Many SFF systems have a lot of characteristics in common these days (I'm talking physical appearance/layout here), some standardisation here would enable the same style of upgrading/replacing components, that made ordinary white boxes into mass-market items. Not being able to swap just the mainboard for example, is one of the reasons I didn't get a SFF box myself yet.
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?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.