Antec
Sonata III: $149
www.antec.com

GOOD LOOKS AND SOLID construction, quiet operation and ample room. Those are the four most important characteristics of a good chassis, and as a VAR, you want to differentiate your whiteboxes by starting with a great enclosure. Antec’s Sonata series, now in its third generation, gives you the most modern design out there with a number of features that reflect its refined pedigree.

The differences are apparent by just looking at the chassis. The polished piano-black finish is perhaps most eye-catching. From the front, the Sonata III offers high-definition audio output, USB connectivity, and an eSATA port for high-speed storage. A metal, double-hinged door hides three 5.25” drive bays and a pair of 3.5” bays. The door opens to 225 degrees and is, of course, lockable. Spin the case around and you’ll find a bundled 120mm Tri-Cool fan with three available speed settings.

Inside there’s more of the same quality. Steel construction may not be as light as some of the aluminum cases out there, but it certainly makes for a more durable enclosure. The external drive bays are caged off. However, all four internal 3.5” bays have their own tray slots cushioned by silicone grommets to protect hard drives from vibrations. Finally, Antec bundles its EarthWatts 500 power supply, equipped with a universal input and active PFC. The 80 PLUS-certified PSU adds value by saving money on energy.

QNAP
TS-109 Pro: $259
www.qnap.com.tw

STORAGE NEVER GOES OUT OF STYLE—DOUBLY SO WHEN you can show your small office customers functionality they’ve never seen before. There’s a good chance that when you install QNAP’s TS-109 Pro, some of the NAS box’s features will be familiar, but others should get your customers excited about new ideas in network storage.

Start with the simple stuff—multimedia content serving. The TS-109 Pro provides a Web interface with the access to manage albums or preview media files. Support for Universal Plug and Play technology lets the server connect to a digital media player and stream music and videos over a network. The TS-109 Pro can also function as an iTunes server, beaming content purchased from Apple’s music store across the house. Configured as a download server, the TS-109 acts as the target for saved torrents without requiring that your customer leave a PC on.

Beyond its skill in dealing with digital media, the TS-109 Pro can also handle data security and backup. QNAP’s Q-RAID technology lets you connect another USB drive or eSATA box to mirror data. If there’s no spare drive handy, run backups over the Internet to a remote repository and save important information from fire or theft. In a small home network, the TS-109 can operate as a Web server (host a personal site), a print server (just connect a USB printer), a file server (automatically centralize data), an FTP server (make downloads available over the Net), and a backup server (preserve specific files and directories from client machines on a set schedule).

The TS-109 Pro ships without a hard drive, meaning resellers can zero in on price by upselling more or less capacity. Gigabit Ethernet delivers plenty of bandwidth, and the device’s USB and eSATA ports support today’s most popular desktop direct-attach interfaces.

Intel
T7700 Core 2 Duo Processor: $530
www.intel.com

BUILDING CENTRINO NOTEBOOKS BASED ON THE NEW Santa Rosa platform gives you the opportunity to explore mobile performance that wasn’t available a couple of months ago. The latest Core 2 Duo processors provide access to 4MB of cache, 800 MHz front side buses, and the efficiency of Intel’s 65nm manufacturing process. Paired with two channels of fast DDR2 memory, you have plenty of bandwidth feeding the processor’s cores.

It’d only be natural to assume that better performance means higher power consumption. But Intel has significantly improved the mobile chip’s power handling capabilities. For example, Dynamic Power Coordination manages low-power states for each core on the die independently. When your customer doesn’t need the extra horsepower, energy is conserved. There’s also quite a bit of optimization going on when the Core 2 Duo and mobile GM965 chipset interact. Working as a pair, the two can detect single-threaded applications and use a feature called Dynamic Acceleration Technology to turn one core off and overclock the other, maintaining a consistent thermal profile. Threaded software switches the processor back, utilizing the benefits of two cores running at their default frequencies.

The T7700 is Intel’s current flagship Core 2 Duo chip, clocking in at 2.4 GHz on its 800 MHz bus. At $530, it’s decidedly a premium part. However, when you factor in the extra front-side bus speed, 667 MHz memory support, and dual execution cores, there is no better option for the customer who needs top-end speed on the go. If the asking price is simply too high, go for the T7300, which includes the same 4MB cache and 800 MHz bus speed but runs at a slightly downclocked 2.0 GHz.

NETGEAR
Digital Entertainer HD: $379
www.netgear.com

SEVERAL COMPANIES HAVE tried their hand at the media player appliance concept: sharing videos and songs from PCs on a network, accessing those files from a slim set-top appliance, and playing them back on more traditional home theater equipment. The problem we’ve seen with those media players has usually been one of incompleteness. Either they don’t have the right hardware outputs, they don’t support all of the file types media enthusiasts use, or they’re simply difficult to navigate. NETGEAR’s Digital Entertainer HD changes all of that with the right hardware and software combination to play back high-definition content in the living room.

The Digital Entertainer features several video outputs, including HDMI, component, S-Video, and composite. Audio is transmitted through a digital coax/optical connection or through a pair of stereo RCA jacks. An Ethernet port provides hard-wired communications for more permanent installations. Otherwise, integrated 802.11g wireless networking delivers plenty of bandwidth to stream audio and video. Two USB 2.0 ports let your customer attach storage directly to the Digital Entertainer, which works well for connecting portable devices.

Beyond simply playing back saved content, the Entertainer can turn a PC with a tuner into a PVR by scheduling recordings and broadcasting the content to the LAN. Or go the other way and look at the PC’s display on a TV. Be it a photo slide show or Windows Media Player visualization, that’s cool functionality too.