Heres a review:

http://www.mini-itx.com/2006/07/13/nexus-launch-a-psile

First off, i cant believe how beautiful it is. I never thought id see someone make a PC case that looks as good as apple enclosures.

Its almost a perfect cube. 22.5 x 22.5 x 19.1cm (8.87 x 8.87 x 7.53 inches)

Mini-ITX, has an expansion slot, a sexy stealthed slimline slot load optical drive, support for a single 3.5" or 2.5" hard drive, lined with damptek, has a single 80mm fan.

The only thing im a little wary about is the amount of space between the expansion slot and the side of the case. I wonder how well aftermarket vga heatsinks would fit in it, if at all.

Still, you could easily put a core duo processor, 2gb of ddr2 memory, and a 7600gs passive pcie video card in that with a 2.5" notebook drive for a small, sexy, gamming rig.

heres a site with a bunch of info on it:

http://www.psile.com/index.php

couldnt find any us retailers that sell just the enclosure, mini-itx has them for about $300, but they are located in europe, so shipping would be a bit much.

while $300 is a bit hefty for a case, it does come with a slimline slot load DVD+R panasonic optical drive. if you consider the optical drive is about $100, then its not too bad, still on the pricey side of things though.

heres some information on how the airflow works in the case:

http://www.psile.com/index.php?ID=21#number3

the rods that the case fan hang from can be moved from side to side, and the fan on the rods can be moved forward in back, allowing you to position the 80mm fan almost anywhere inside the case.

It looks like its designed to have hot air pushed out of the case with the case fan, and cool air is sucked into the case from the bottom vent holes, cooling the hard drive first, then rising to be used the the case fan to activly cool whatever you have it pointed at.

it uses a nexus 80mm "real quiet" case fan.

it also has the option to change the color of the LED on the front of the case, and it has a mounting hole for an external antenna for use with a wifi card. You can also custom make your own "skin" design for use on the top and left/right sides of the case to personalize it a bit more.

Looks pretty awesome. Paired up with one of these it could make a really sweet little system.

Whoa, the Holy Grail! I've never actually found anything but VIA and Intel P4/P3/P-M ITX boards before. Much less Athlon64 + nVidia!

I'd get it. It'd make for a nice, fast internet + music box. And such a pretty, pretty case, too . . .

That's the most powerful ITX board I've ever seen. I wonder if there could be a Core Duo/Core2 Duo board on the way to get some multicore goodness into the ITX formfactor?

There are some Core Duo motherboards on the suggested components page but nothing Core 2 Duo I guess...

This would be my prefered board right now:

http://www.logicsupply.com/product_info ... cts_id/552

Core Duo, pci-express 16x slot, 2x mini-pci slots, 2x sata, 6x usb 2.0, 2 slots capable of 4gb of 667mhz ddr2 modules, firewire, gigabit lan, spdif optical port


i dont really see whats so special about that athlon board, other than the fact that amd mini itx boards are rare. it uses regular ddr memory, and only has a pci slot, not a pci-express 16x slot.

Whoa. Okay, you win. This is really nice, yeah. If you don't mind keeping strictly to a 32-bit processor (though with dual-core, who cares?). I can't believe someone managed to pack this much into a mini-ITX board. I think I'll have to save up and get it, even though it's extremely pricey. Shove this into the Nexus chassis, or even the Hoojum Cubit, and I think it could handle just about anything you'd care to throw at it. Man, that'd be a nice little machine. So much happiness to come in such a small package.

it does remind me alot of the Cubit 3 enclosure. Hoojum's been seemingly sitting on his hands on those enclosures though. His site was broken for the longest time with links that didnt work, and ive never heard anything about united states availability ever. Its a shame too, they are nice looking cases.

At least with nexus, we know they already sell all their products in the states currently, so it wouldnt be unrealistic to see these cases soon.

My guess is that the guy behind the Hoojum was majorly screwed by VIA keeping postponing the nano-ITX. He had a case for it designed and a prototype made. (It was showcased by VIA on some fair in Taiwan ages ago.) It's probably cost him enough money. For a single person home business these things get fatal much faster than for a big company.

On the other hand it wouldn't amaze me if that same guy turned out to be the designer of the Psile. Hoojum and mini-itx.com worked closely together in the past. And mini-itx.com was very fast with their review and dealership for the UK for the Psile.

I first saw pics of this case nearly a year ago & thought -- yuk, how homely! I still think it's just an enlarged aluminum project box, the kind I build little electronic projects in. And that price is just... Just goes to show you, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

At least it doesn't look like an 80s refrigerator.

Back to the Nexus case:

Granted, the price is just a little steep, especially if you factor in the $300+ Core Duo motherboard referenced above. Add in the rest of your components, and you're probably looking at a $700 system even before adding a monitor. Pricey for such a cute box. Doesn't seem nearly as attractive to me as it did a little bit ago.

To me, the Hoojum has always and will always be very easy on the eyes, though there doesn't seem to be any way to get it in the US unless you can work out an arrangement with SCAN. They offer (among other things) system integration services, as well as selling Cubit cases separately. No word on international shipping, though.

MikeC: asthetics aside, this looks like a prime candidate for an SPCR enclosure review. what sort of timeline do you think it would take to have one done? i would think nexus would have contacted SPCR first about this product as this site promotes most of its other products.

Honestly i dont see how you cant like how it looks. Its like a piece of art to put in the middle of your living room table. The first thing i thought when i looked at is was "did apples design team work on this", it looks like somthing they would come up with, but at the same time its not a copycat of somthing they already did.

I probably wont be upgrading my wife's computer for about another year, but when i do ive already talked to her about building one around this enclosure. She wants to get a custum skin on it with "eeyore" from whini the poo on it.

EDIT:



He's got a point Mike, how can you like the looks of an oversized refrigerator style case, and not like this?

it's really nice
i wonder if can get a review sample

one thing i love that they did, or didnt do rather, is not have some stupid 3" thick bezel on the front of the case to try and make it look better. Bezels are such a waist of space. It's like they try to make a large rectangular object look curvy by just putting a mask on the front of it, instead of what these guys have done and actually change the case itself to be more asthetically pleasing. And personally, the only real way to make an optical bay look good is to stealth it, and this is the best way to do it i think.

Everytime i see a case with a bezel i just wanna rip it off and slap a sheet of anodized aluminum up on the front of it instead, and just make cutouts for the power button, case ventalation, and drive bays.

Well surprise, Commell is expensive, as usual.

Here's another mini-ITX mobo, the MS-9642.
It costs €170 (= US$216) in Europe. PCIe x16, PCI, 3 x GigaBit LAN, and ONE regular DDR2 slot. The best part is socket 478 mounting holes.

commell is also an industrial board maker, not a really end user oriented. I think part of the reason they are so much is because of the number of layers of PCB they use, i believe its more than your typical retail boards. Also ive heard the level of quality they put into their products is higher than retail boards. their main customer base are buisness proffesionals that demand the highest stability and dependability possible.

I'm all for Mini-ITX becomming more of a standard with all motherboard makers though. I'd love to see some Mini-ITX boards from ASUS and Gigabyte.

All i really need on a board is a pci-e 16x slot, at least 1x mini pci slot, dual channel ddr2, onboard LAN and Video.

Some other preferences id like to have is a standard mounting system for the CPU heatsink, a DVI port for the video, gigabit lan, a coax spdif port, and built in dc/dc conveter with a 12v input.

I love how my current commell board has a single 12v input for power, its probably the single biggest feature i like the most on the board.

So close, but yet so far to what i'm after.

If you could put two expansion slots in (one for Graphics, the other for a dual tv tuner), it'd be just about perfect.



Still, you can get away with external USB tuners.. though i've very little experience with them.

So what's wrong with the MSI card?

Edit: Ah, you're talking about the case...

DVI out. That's what Does It For Me(TM).


I'm curious to know what's the tallest heatink which will fit in that case. With something akin to a mini-Ninja it could be rather good. The closest I've found is the Akasa Evo 33, which takes an 80mm fan.

I just got a reply from "Nexus Technology USA".

The guy said that the Case w/ optical drive alone will never be sold in the united states. The only way to get it in the states is to buy it as a barebone system or a fully configured system from a vendor. He did say that other vendors besides endpcnoise.com were going to be selling them in the states in the near future.

I sent back a reply asking if mabey you can buy just the case w/ optical drive from a european vendor and get it shipped to the states. We'll see what he says.

Even if i cant get just the case w/ optical drive, endpcnoise at least has the motherboard i would want to put in it anyhow. So, for me anyhow, its not a huge deal.

Just to follow up, I mailed Nexus several weeks ago asking how much clearance there was between the processor and top of the motherboard. The response I got was less than precise:

"The clearance is at least 9.5 cm. We know that the Nexus PHT-7750 fits
inside with no problem!"

The whole thing looks like my grandmothers old four slice toaster. The design is interesting and efficient but aesthetically I think it leaves much to be desired.
Then again aesthetics are subjective and unrelated to function so ...

A good thing about the Commell LV-677 is that it's available with either 24-pin ATX connector, or an external DC connector. The input Voltage must be between 8 - 21 V, which gives you more alternatives when choosing external power supplies.

The reason I'm keenly interested in the Psile is its PSU: it doesn't have one.

Generally SFF cases either use an ATX PSU, which makes the case much larger than it needs to be, or uses some smaller PSU which is impossible or impractical to replace, if it is noisy. The Psile uses no PSU (if the m/b has a DC power input) or something picoPSU-like (their version, or someone else's.)

It also has space for a GPU and (due to the PSU not getting in the way) for a reasonably sizable CPU heatsink.

I do wish they'd found a way to fit a 120mm exhaust fan rather than the 80mm repositionable internal fan. I'm also not fond of the "U shaped sheet of metal" style of case covering/door.

If there are other SFF cases out there with the same attitude to the PSU, please let me know.

Hi Guys,

Try, Custom Computa, they have ready built Nexus Psile and the Hush Fanless Media Center PCs.