Hi guys. I recently built a small system based on those (sorry, link in French: http://www.materiel.net/carte-mere-mini-itx/zotac-a75-itx-wifi-a75itx-a-e-72631.html , http://www.materiel.net/mini-boitier-pc/gigabyte-mib-t3140-68520.html). The stock AMD CPU cooler gets quite noisy, I'm looking for a ...

This kind of review throws me back to the last decade. I've given up gaming (almost, slower games now) and moved from gaming rigs to the smallest possible rigs: a Thermaltake Element Q with a mini-itx board and a 3GB HD as a NAS/Torrent/FTP/... server, and an E-360 nettop. Planning on moving the ser...

Thanks a lot for your reply, this looks good.

Hi. A friend of mine has created a software system for doing on-the-fly positional sound regardless of number of speakers. He's trying to get his software into sound studios, and apparently the only way to do that is to offer a complete hardware+software package. He's telling me the standard for sou...

I'm having a problem connecting the front panel USB ports, because the picoPSU is quite high, and blocks the front panel USB connector. Do you guys know of any source for an internal USB cable (female-female) with one head about half as long as usual ? The one I currently have is like the picture be...

What fully passive, vesa-mountable, pint-size case is good then ? My guess is none, and the better I can hope for is one with good air flow, and a single low-rpm fan ?

I can't help but feel Asus should have shaved 5mm off of the heatsink, and put a large (12cm ?), thin (1cm might not even require any shaving), slow fan pretty much covering the whole thing. Or at least, given us the option to do it by adding screw holes in the right places.

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0002 064 059 --- Old_age Always - 35 (Min/Max 21/43) HDD is not in the database though. I'm not sure what value is relevant: raw ? value ? why is "worst" lower than "value" ?

I've put 2 fans, one behind the bezel on the right, the other one at the back right-side mount, both blowing air out, and the case vertical, right side up (so the cables don't fall off, and the cooling fins are vertical, and both fans towards the top (though neither are on the top side, both are at ...

Thanks a lot for the tip. My cases came w/o manuals, and I hadn't seen that 3rd fan mount.

Gonna try it as soon as I feel up to disconnecting for a few minutes !

Thanks for your reply. Laying the case horizontally does not seem to have much of an impact on temperature. I don't have much choice as to where to locate the fans: there's only room for them over the "left" side of the heatsink on the photo, ie over the part that starts at the ASUS written on the h...

double post, sorry, see below.

or out ? Hi. I've bought that wonderfully small MB, and the passive M350 case. I'm using it VESA-mounted at the back of my monitor, with the MB's cooling fins vertical for better airflow. The beast is still at 60°C, including the HDD that's very close to it. Cooling fans are in order... and luckily,...

Are we looking at the same graphs ? I'm seeing Sandy Bridge using about twice as much power with CPU/GPU load, and about the same at idle or video. My take is: - if you're not going to use to CPU/GPU much anyways, why pay more for Sandy Bridge ? For a silent NAS/torrent/HTPC box, E350 makes sense. -...

Thanks for the interesting review. How good (or bad) is the integrated sound ? I'm still using only Stereo, and may actually move down to AV-30 or AV-50 speakers. Is the integrated soundcard good enough, or will I have to add an audiophile soundcard in the one lone expansion slot ? I'm currently usi...

"de facto"... you keep using that word.. I'm not sure it means what you think it means.

Thanks for a nice review. I'm kinda underwhelmed by the mini-itx choices on the intel side. Asus seem to have an AM3 mini-itx board (http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=jGAoIFEziW5sPYy7) that is quite feature-complete (except for the "integrated bluetooth" that turns out to be a usb dongle, and no...

Kinda interesting, but I'm really wondering how you came up with the specs. I would have thought a dual-core atom w/ 2 gigs of RAM plenty already. do you have any data on cpu usage for typical loads ? is windows that much worse than linux ?

I didn't know about the Blue's Reduced Power Spinup, nor is it mentionned in tests.

That helps a lot.

There's a lot happening on the ARM front, with the "Plug" products soon to come with a bit richer IO, including HDMI. Looking at the user experiences, one frequent issue when connecting an external USB drive to these plugs is a dead PSU: HDD spin-up power requirements are well above the max allowed ...

as an upgrade to an existing system, or if you must need a totally silent PC, this card might make sense.

for a new system, it doesn't: $60 goes a long way towards upgrading to any number of real CPUs that will not only decode HD, but do everything else much quicker.

How do those Atom+ION mini PCs compare to the Dell Zino HD ? At first glance, the Dell seems much more powerful and versatile, I'm just doubtful about acoustics (noise) and... acoustics (sound out: 2.1 officially, but doesn't the 780g do 5.1 over HDMI, and the 4330, 7.1 ?) The Zino HD starts at $229...