Suggestions for SFF system, browsing & light work

gdonovan

[H]ard|Gawd
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Oct 7, 2004
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Looking for a low powered, near silent system for web browsing & light work.

Would like it to be Atom powered, run XP or Win2000pro or Ubuntu, have an internal 3.5" drive bay and a 5.25" external drive bay with DVI or HDMI output to drive my Samsung 24" HDTV/monitor.

MSI makes a Wind barebones Atom kit but has just normal VGA output and lots of complaints about it being noisy.

Hit me with what ya got!
 
I would get something like an ASRock ION 330. It's the best Ion box on the european market, not sure how the US situation is.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856158007

It doesn't have an internal 3,5" slot but the HDD options should suffice for most scenarios. If you really need room for a 3,5" drive, get any Ion ITX board and put it into a case of your liking :)
 
I would get something like an ASRock ION 330. It's the best Ion box on the european market, not sure how the US situation is.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856158007

It doesn't have an internal 3,5" slot but the HDD options should suffice for most scenarios. If you really need room for a 3,5" drive, get any Ion ITX board and put it into a case of your liking :)

Yes, I want a 3.5 drive slot since I have a pile of SATA drives to use and hate slower laptop drives, ditto for the DVD drive.

Under $300 is a concern too.

That is a nice ready to go box though.
 
$170 - Zotac IONITX-D-E Atom 330 CPU Nvidia Ion m-ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo
$35 - Apex MI-100BK mITX Tower Case w/ Allied 250W Power Supply
$59 - A-Data ADQVE1B16K 2 x 2GB DDR2 800 RAM
----
Total: $264 plus tax and shipping

I'm assuming that you're reusing a hard drive and a DVD drive.
 
$170 - Zotac IONITX-D-E Atom 330 CPU Nvidia Ion m-ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo
$35 - Apex MI-100BK mITX Tower Case w/ Allied 250W Power Supply
$59 - A-Data ADQVE1B16K 2 x 2GB DDR2 800 RAM
----
Total: $264 plus tax and shipping

I'm assuming that you're reusing a hard drive and a DVD drive.

That motherboard is a nice looking piece.
 
Is a requirement smooth playback from DVD?
Are you planning on capture of TV?
Any BlueRay in your future?
 
Is a requirement smooth playback from DVD?
Are you planning on capture of TV?
Any BlueRay in your future?

No to all three, I have a burly machine in the living room that handles those chores. I need the DVD drive for light burning chores.

I'm just looking for something that uses little power that isn't a slug while doing my morning and evening mail.

I have a laptop but can't stand the small screen after using a 24"
 
is that really an issue as it sounds like you have more than one PC in your home and as such you should be looking into a central data storage.

I have a fleet of PC's here!

I'm looking for ways to save energy, I don't need a beast that draws 200+ watts idling for the casual web browsing I do most of the time.

Yes 2.5" drives use less power but the access time on most are so slow...
 
that 230 chip is the aspire isn't the dual core atom...I'd make the dual core atom a requirement and the new ION chipset a requirement.
 
that 230 chip is the aspire isn't the dual core atom...I'd make the dual core atom a requirement and the new ION chipset a requirement.

I have a Dell mini 9 with the single core, a single core Atom will do the job.
 
Pulled the trigger on the REVO, will post results when it comes in.

I'm looking for review. I'm looking to get one for a low power, small footprint web surfing machine for the living room. With the low power atom, ION chipset and WinXP for $200, it's hard to beat.

Will you be doing any mods/upgrades to it?
 
I'm looking for review. I'm looking to get one for a low power, small footprint web surfing machine for the living room. With the low power atom, ION chipset and WinXP for $200, it's hard to beat.

Will you be doing any mods/upgrades to it?

Another gig of ram.

I'll order after it arrives or the REVO may take the same ram as my Mini 9 (fairly sure it does) if so I'll take the 2 gig stick from the mini and swap it for the 1 gig in the REVO.

The Mini runs Linux and really doesn't need 2 gig, was a cheap upgrade from the 512 mb that was in there.
 
Came in today, snappy little system! Spent a few hours nuking all the junk loaded up by Acer.

Mine came with a WD 2.5" drive.

And yes I have already taken it apart and it does run the same ram as my mini 9, matter of fact it has the original 512 mb stick in the second slot!

Doesn't like to play MKV files, chokes with VLC player (stutters) going to try and crank up the memory set aside for graphics (stock is 128, upping to 256 didn't seem to make much of a difference)
 
you have too install media player classic (no middleware) and enable EVR in option--->output. So that video card is doing the decodecing and not the CPU.
 
you have too install media player classic (no middleware) and enable EVR in option--->output. So that video card is doing the decodecing and not the CPU.

The version I downloaded didn't have the option but no matter, IT WORKED GREAT!

Cpu usage didn't pop over 12% while playing back an 8 gig MKV movie =)

Sweet!
 
So far the first full day of use- System will lag slightly time to time but only when I have a huge number of tabs going in IE8 (9 or 10 tabs actually) along with Outlook cranking in the background. Page file is currently around 880 megs as I type this up.

Expect 1 gig stick of ram to arrive next week from newegg, will post pics when I crack the system open again. 2 gig of ram total should perk things up a bit.

System noise is very, very slight.. you can only hear the system fan and drive under certain conditions, typing is louder than this rig.
 
I don't see anything that would be a show stopper, I'm considering a second for just that.
 
lilfleck - Atom cpu is horrible for flash but ion is good for HD video.

I'm starting to change my tune about that. Looks like they're finally getting their acts together on the Flash hardware/GPU acceleration front:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Adob...1-On-Netbooks-and-Mobile-Devices-123329.shtml

So, most likely by the end of this year or very early next year, you should be able to play full screen HD Flash video with an ION, ION LE, or any other Nvidia GPU. That $200.00 Acer is looking pretty good for a small extender or even low end HTPC right about now...
 
DSCN1227.JPG


System hanging on the back on my 24" HDTV / monitor

DSCN1228.JPG


With cover off.

DSCN1229.JPG


Added 1 gig stick of Corsair DDR2 667 mhz from Newegg.

DSCN1230.JPG


Running full scale Microsoft memtest.

Forgot to mention- Picked up a USB powered LG DVD burner from newegg for $44 shipped to go with the unit.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827136158
 
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Gdonovan, thanks for the internal pics. Nobody else online has posted those as far as I know. A first! Cool stuff.

I might get one of these (dual-core version) for my mom for the holidays... She probably won't believe it's a real computer (the way she thought the Samsung S10 netbook I got for my 12-year-old neice wasn't a real laptop at first), then she'll be a little shocked--then she'll settle in with it and think it's cute before showing it off to her friends... :)
 
Gdonovan, thanks for the internal pics. Nobody else online has posted those as far as I know. A first! Cool stuff.

I might get one of these (dual-core version) for my mom for the holidays... She probably won't believe it's a real computer (the way she thought the Samsung S10 netbook I got for my 12-year-old neice wasn't a real laptop at first), then she'll be a little shocked--then she'll settle in with it and think it's cute before showing it off to her friends... :)



I'm going to make you all laugh this morning- I'm still running the Acer Revo R1600 (Atom 230 CPU) as a daily browsing box since 2009 with the only upgrade since then being a Samsung SSD last week. The uptime on this thing has been unreal with only an occasional cleaning to get the dust bunnies out. The original hard drive was cloned to the SSD last week and still working fine.

The system is so old Acer doesn't even have it listed on the support site.

Oddly enough, Newegg still shows the original listing on theirs.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...103228&cm_re=acer_atom-_-83-103-228-_-Product

Now I jinxed myself and it will catch fire next week!

Gary
 
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