Considering SFF comeback

[StratocasterMaster]

I had bought one of the first SFF's to come to market two+ years ago and was happy with it except for the power and performance limitations. Now with newer ones the power limitations seem to have been overcome and the latest/greatest chipsets seem to keep performance at your fingertips too.

I want to leave P4's behind and move back to AMD, perhaps with a 3200+ 939 'Venice' chip for cost sake. I might dabble in some overclocking again but nothing extreme.

My other goal is to stay ATI, sorry to offend any nvidia fans but I just prefer ATI at the moment. I know ATI was developing a pretty nice chipset but I dont know if its come to market yet or if its offered in the SFF boards at all. I am curious as I've seen SoundStorm mentioned along side some of the nVidia chipsets -- how does the sound perform? Is it on par or above the Audigy2 series cards? I really just would prefer something with nice sound that is capable of handling my 5.1 speakers. Not sure what ATI has for sound offerings and I'm none to fond of VIA's AC97 etc.... so I may end up scavenging my Audigy2 over to the new system. :/

This will be my at home machine thats good for quick packs to go LANing, my last one served me well until it couldnt handle newer video cards. I built a Shuttle for my friend recently with a 3200+ AMD64 chip and a Radeon X700 PCI-E card, it performs very well with little quarks so I may consider that route. I think his model was a ST20G5.

Anyways, is the 'next big thing' on the horizon for SFF comps or would settling into a ST20 be a good idea now? I dont need SLI, in fact I will probably get an X800 and call it done video wise, and get a gig of Corsair XMS.

~Kris

 

[Soymilk]

get the sn25p instead of the st20g5. its a lot better. st20g5 cant overclock for crap, the sn25p can. and nvidia's nforce4 ultra chipset > ati xpress 200 chipset.

 

[dderidex]

With the ST20G, you could use the Audigy - it has PCI slots in addition to the PCI-E slot.

However, the SN25P really has an order of magnitude better design. The Xpress200 chipset (which I'm using right now, for example) is ADEQUATE...but that's it. Nothing to write home about, and it just *feels* slower than the SN25P I had.

Only downside to ANY Shuttle box, of course, is the entirely proprietary parts throughout. If I didn't care about that, I'd be using an SN25P right now! Although it cannot take an Audigy (no PCI slot), it does have the next best chipset currently available as onboard audio - the Envy24.

Anyway, I do care about non-proprietary parts, so went with a standard mATX case and mATX mobo - basically requiring the mobo I selected, as there were not many Socket 939 mATX mobos when I last went shopping!