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by William Van Winkle |
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ECS P60 AOpen was not the only company Intel tapped to help develop mainstream SFF designs sure to dazzle buyers of all stripes. A bare 9.0" x 7.78" x 1.65", the P60 really is book-sized and weighs just 2.6 pounds. The unit bears more than a coincidental similarity to the AOpen miniPC Duo both in construction and component selection, but there are a few notable differences.
The transformation here from ECS's prior stab at SFF in the U.S. market, the EZ-Buddie, is startling. "One of the reasons the EZ-Buddie may not have sold as well as we'd hoped is that it is not a standard form factor," observes ECS' Jason Fan. "When it comes to proprietary solutions, there is always some concern from the customer's point of view. However, now you have Intel driving the small form factor market, educating end-users, and helping them to accept this idea. That will make a difference. "There's that, and there's also the fact that the EZ-Buddie suffered from significant aesthetic deficiencies when targeting a North American audience. Stated bluntly, ECS tried to capitalize on the old SFF boom by using a cube form factor while bottoming out the price with average construction and trailing edge components. If this left a sour taste in anyone's mouth as to whether ECS was a viable SFF play, rest assured that the P60 is a radical move in the right direction. The P60's 1.9-liter frame isn't as sturdy as AOpen's miniPC Duo, but we prefer its overall ID, its ability to orient horizontally or vertically, and its deeper feature set. Gigabyte H961-RH
By now, you can guess many of the primary specs: 945GM chipset, twin DDR2 slots, 7.1 HD Audio, SATA hard drive with PATA ODD, 7-in-1 card reader, 1394a, and USB. Gigabyte uses a proprietary motherboard format, but you do get one low-profile PCI slot and one standard PCI on a riser. The weak point on the backplane is only having 10/100 LAN, but coax SPDIF, composite, component, S-Video, VGA, and DVI make one heck of an apology. On the front panel, twin VU meters and conventional player control buttons combined with classic black and silver styling will make fans of any home audio fan, and a Mini PCI slot internally sits in wait of wireless connectivity. The classic set-top chassis is a 6.1-liter design for Core Solo/Duo processors. "I think this is going to do really well in the mainstream," says Gigabyte marketing manager Thomas Lee. "A lot of analysts and other industry people thought that a smaller form factor set-top box would be a better idea, but if you look at the Intel platform, how it's tailored to replacing some of the devices we have in the home right now, like the DVR, it's perfectly suited to the living room. You can consolidate your home PC, your VHS, your DVR, your CD and DVD player, and soon your digital set-top tuner all in one attractive box. People prefer the DVR shape instead of a cube or some other form, which look a bit awkward, and they're not easy to fit into a home theater shelf." MSI 945GT Speedster, mPC 945 Regionality is a curious thing. In Taiwan, the MSI 945GT Speedster motherboard is being sold as a Yonah-based solution targeted at low-end workstations and servers with a focus on low power consumption. Here in the States, MSI is slanting the same board as a MoDT product. Take your pick. Either way, the 945GT packs in a lot of desirable features. The northbridge is Intel's 945GT chip, much like the 945GM except that the GT uses Intel generation 3.5 graphics with a 400 MHz core speed rather than the GMA 950's 333 MHz. The southbridge is Intel's ICH7R, which is a bit of a shame since a simple flip to the ICH7-DH would have made this a killer Viiv board. MSI bundles a reportedly silent heatsink fan with the package. The 945GT Speedster supports two 240-pin DDR2 modules, four 3 Gbps SATA drives, 1394a, VGA plus DVI on the backplane, Gigabit LAN, and Realtek's excellent ALC880 HD Audio codec with optical SPDIF out and a full set of 7.1 analog jacks. By default, the board ships as a microATX design with four slots. However, there is an edge connecter beside the end PCI slot that joins to an extension sporting another two PCI slots, thus turning the Speedster into a standard ATX board. While review units weren't available in North America by press time, the 945GT Speedster looks to be one of the more creative and versatile MoDT platforms. MSI senior product manager Andy Tung projects that the board will sell for around $180, only $20 more than the company's current 915GM MoDT board. Remember, this is the same company now promoting sub-$50 Socket 754 boards as a mobile-on-desktop solution. "That's why a lot of people are using Turion," says Tung. "It's still a mobile solution, but it's—what? Forty bucks for the board?" MSI also has two MoDT SFF designs en route: the 11-liter, microATX Midas 945GT and the 7-liter, mini-ITX Ares 945GM, both of which are Socket 479 uprights. However, chances are that the advantages of the cube design still have fans among your customer base. If so, consider MSI's mPC 945. We received one of the first samples of this unit and were pleasantly surprised once we got beyond the cubist white tile fascia. The new mPC uses Socket 775 processors along with the 945G/ICH7 chipset, Gigabit LAN, and the ALC880 audio chip. Two DDR2 slots, a 260W power supply, 7-in-1 card reader, both 1394a jack types, one x16 PCIe slot, and one PCI slot round out this well-appointed box. Our unit included a wireless Mini PCI card, although the manual notes this as being optional. MSI's construction is rigid yet lightweight. A lateral-blowing CPU cooler comes included, and the air stream blows toward the backplane's exhaust fan, drawing in cool air from the side paneling.
Sapphire X1600 Pro HDMI We've addressed the tuner card and available slot conundrum already, but there are two more video pitfalls awaiting unsuspecting home theater PC consumers: HDCP support and H.264 playback. We need to pause for some technical background, but hang in there. Without all of this info, you don't get why the Sapphire card is such a big deal.
To the best of our knowledge, Sapphire is the only company now selling an HDMI-equipped, HDCP-compliant, low profile video card suitable for next-gen video playback. The X1600 Pro HDMI uses ATI's Radeon X1600 Pro GPU, a 180 million transistor mainstream workhorse with formidable, hardware-based H.264 support. H.264, also known as MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC (Advanced Video Coding), is the high-def video codec at the heart of HD-DVD, Blu-Ray Disc, and other HD video standards. H.264 is similar in concept to the MPEG-2 decoding done for DVD playback, which can be computed either via software through the CPU or in hardware, generally within the GPU. Hardware approaches are almost always superior because they take the decoding burden off the central processor and leave the chip available for other necessary system tasks. DVD-quality MPEG-2 has a bitrate of 15 Mbps. H.264 has high-quality profiles for 1080p (1080 lines or more with progressive rather than interlaced scanning) that start at 25 Mbps and span up to 960 Mbps. In other words, H.264 is more compute-intensive to decode than MPEG-2, and the bandwidth required to process 1080 line frames is far greater than the 525-line frames native to DVD. 1080 is a magic number because 1080p is the emerging standard for HDTV television sets. You're likely to see industry messaging stating that the GMA 950 graphics core in the 945G/GM/GME chipset can support next-generation content. To be clearer, the GMA 950 can support 720i and 720p HDTV modes just fine. However, while the GMA 950 supports 1080p on paper, in practice reviewers have reported several problems in this mode, including dropped frames, blinking lines, and over 30% greater CPU utilization than when the same video stream is handled in a discrete GPU. This isn't a criticism of Intel's chipset. Not even ATI's X1300 GPU can adequately handle 1080p. The X1600 Pro is the lowest-end GPU in ATI's lineup that can meet the task. Additionally, ATI's X1000 series supports the H.264 codec in hardware while the GMA 950 does not. So now you see why Sapphire's card is such a necessary upsell in the HTPC space. At the same time, you understand why you should be careful in discussing future content support in ultra-SFF designs. USB- or FireWire-based H.264/1080p decoders may arrive to fill the gap, but it remains to be seen if the massive bandwidth consumed by that application is feasible in an external device. The Sapphire X1600 Pro HDMI has another element to note. The HDMI interface is designed to carry both the video and audio streams. In the low profile card version, you route the digital audio stream from the motherboard or sound card to the Sapphire card via a patch cable. In the full-height version, there is an external SPDIF in on the backplane and a patch cable to connect with the PC's regular SPDIF out port. "With our product you only have one cable for digital video and digital audio," says Sapphire's Carsten Berger. "There are monitors that already have digital surround included, and most are with an HDMI cable. Now you only need one cable. Before you needed six for Dolby Digital 5.1." In May, Carsten expects Sapphire to release a passively cooled version of the X1600 Pro HDMI, which should drive silent HTPC devotees into giddy hysterics, even though it will mean downclocking the GPU by about 150 MHz. Additionally, for those who route their audio directly through the regular outputs, Sapphire bundles an HDMI-to-DVI dongle, and Carsten notes that HDCP-protected content will play at full resolution through the adapter. An HDMI cable is also included. Shuttle X100
The X100 looks from the outside to be built much like other ultra-SFFs. Interestingly, though, the slimline DVD burner and 2.5" hard drive are mounted below the motherboard, which makes the DIYers in us cringe at the thought of component swapping, but the motherboard is proprietary anyway. The included tri-band wireless NIC is MiniCard-based, and there are two SO-DIMM slots. The backplane shows USB, 1394a, 5.1 analog and optical SPDIF audio, Gigabit LAN, DVI, and DC power. The X100's final specs are still unfinalized as of this writing, but one likely configuration offered by product marketing manager Kevin Tu suggested a Core Duo T2300, 512MB of 533 MHz DDR2, 200GB SATA drive, combo burner, ATI X1400 graphics, MCE 2005, and a USB TV tuner for $1,099. Moreover, the ATI GPU, in addition to being discrete with 128MB of memory, is a removable core based on MXM socketing. Give it up for Shuttle being the only vendor so far to resolve the ultra-small integrated graphics problem. How the X1400 does with 1080p content, however, remains to be seen. Cinching the Case for SFF "Small form factor is going to be a big hit," quips Shuttle's Kevin Tu. "It's just taking its sweet time to get there. I think the biggest delaying factor is just the education of the market. There's still a lot of people out there who don't get the concept of what small form factor is. They see it's small, then they think it must be cheaper, it's going to overheat, it may be less powerful. We need to overcome that." Not to put too fine a point on it, but quality SFFs are anything but cheap, especially the proprietary designs. Yet you get what you pay for. Extensive attention is paid to cooling and thermal envelopes, and getting a traditional PC to exhibit SFF-class noise levels generally costs almost enough to make up the price difference between the platforms. Besides, if footprints and noise issues don't justify the extra cost in customers' minds, perhaps long-term savings will. "You can actually save money TCO-wise if you start looking at power bills," notes Intel Build to Order Notebooks distribution manager Matt Harrison. "Obviously, it's going to make a difference if we're talking about one person or a whole office. But there are environmentally conscious people out there who turn off all their lights, make sure everything powers down for the night. And for people like that, this may not make a big difference to their pocketbook, but they'll feel better about having less of a power draw. Like my wife gets on me every time I want to leave our PVR-equipped PC on all night to record a show. You'll get less grief with mobile-on-desktop, particularly in small form factor designs." Some SFF environment targets are obvious: living rooms, bedrooms, lobbies, and such. But trying thinking beyond eye appeal and more about the significance of cubic volume. There are plenty of spaces where every inch matters. Take computer labs in schools, where students line up along tables and each is supposed to have a system. Nobody wants towers on the floor where they can be kicked, and desktop space is at an absolute premium. Libraries face a similar problem, especially in arrangements where patrons are facing one another. Libraries tack on the additional consideration of wanting the lowest possible noise. It goes without saying that all publicly funded organizations have a b budget interest in reducing power costs. Expect small form factor to become an increasingly hot prospect in the server space—not necessarily in the I/O intensive world of Xeons and Opterons, but how about a rack of Web servers? Low heat pays off here. And keep in mind that the Core Duo supports virtualization technology, so resellers might configure a SFF box to run as an Apache server on one hand while doing Exchange Server on the other. Half of the battle in selling SFF is finding and configuring a persuasive software implementation that suits the compact design and its environment. Viiv and MCE get most of the attention in this regard, but your sales opportunities will magnify considerably once you start thinking creatively beyond this one application. Right now, we're in a tremendous opportunity window with SFF. The channel has a six- to 12-month head start on the major OEMs. But even when the playing field levels, don't think the opportunity has closed. Your ability to customize SFF machines may be less than standard desktops, but the small size means you'll have more opportunity to sell high-margin peripherals such as tuners and MIMO wireless NICs because such items usually aren't installed internally. Also ponder the openings you'll have for external and LAN-based storage because odds are the SFF system will only have one hard drive. All other benefits aside, perhaps the greatest points about small form factor systems for resellers is that they present a substantial differentiator and something to arouse genuine customer excitement. Even technology cynics have to concede that today's SFF offerings are cool, both literally and figuratively. This isn't a case of trying to impress with UV reactive cabling, cold cathode tubes, or a hillock of copper fins. Small form factor impresses quietly, conveying value and a potential for new computing experiences. Your SFF choices are broad and getting deeper by the day. Float a few configurations past your clientele, see what resonates with them, and set your profits growing by thinking small. |
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