Peter, I don't have any direct hand experience with these Shuttle
mini-boxes, but they've always been considered the best by various
reviewers. Although not silent, they are fairly quiet, from what I can
tell. Expandability is of course fairly limited, and you might want to make
sure there is enough room for any video card that is a bit larger than
usual. A big heatsink, for example, might make adding a PCI card
impossible.
As to the choice between a P4 and an Athlon 64, it depends on what your
plans are for the computer. The Athlons seem to win when it comes to
processing power for things like games, but the P4 continues to do better
with media encoding tasks. On the other hand, a fairly fast processor of
either brand is likely to make most people happy for whatever they do.
A couple of bumps in AMD's favor, which may or may not matter to you, is
that the Athlons appear to be a significantly cooler chip, especially the
90nm products. The new "venice" core socket 939 is the most recent version
of the Athon 64 and would be worth looking for, if you are going with one of
these. AMD's socket 939 will also support the first release of the dual
core Athlons when these become available. Eventually, these will move to a
new socket, but not at first. Intel's dual core processors require a
different chipset from what is available for their single core processors;
so, you can't easily migrate to a dual core P4, later.
Hopefully, someone can fill in these thoughts with some direct experience.
John Sproule
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Shkabara" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, May 30, 2005 11:28 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] shuttle computer
>I am considering a Shuttle computer for my next system. In particular, I
> have looked at model SB95P V2 and SB83G5. Besides the small size, I want a
> quiet computer. Am I barking up the wrong tree? What are the pros and cons
> for these computers?
PCBUILD's List Owners:
Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>
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