Sunday, February 24, 2008

Why SFF barebone PCs are a bad idea...

In 2004 I was looking into spending a chunk of change I had been alloted for a PC purchase. I had been given a new laptop sometime earlier for a work project, so I didn’t need to spend the cash on a laptop as it was originally intended. Like my previous purchase, I decided I’d go big and maximize my dollar by building my own system (sort of). I wanted something fresh and new and a lot of LCD real estate. I had introduced myself to the likes of googlegear.com (now zipzoomfly.com for obvious reasons), newegg.com, and tigerdirect.com. I was looking at media-centric small form factor (SFF) PCs and thinking about getting twin 17” LCD monitors. I found the MSI MEGA 865 Deluxe and thought, “This is what I need! I don’t want to have something stuck under a desk somewhere, and I don’t want to have something monstrous if I have nowhere to hide it. This will be great for my growing library of music and videos, and I can sit it right there on my desk.” It seemed like a great plan.



At some point in my planning I came across Trigem’s Kloss barebones PCs and started to plan my build around the KL-i915a rather than the MSI. It may have been because of the innovative internal design but I think the real reason was the PCIe-x16 video card slot and gigabit ethernet. It was a forward looking chipset versus the older MSI feature set.

I finally pulled the trigger and bought my supplies: The Kloss KL-I915A (~$350), a 2.8 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor (~$180), 2x512 MB of ram (can’t recall the price >$100), an MSI XT-TDI128E (~$150 I think) X600XT video card, and a WD SATA hard drive. All told, my total for the computer was probably around $800. Upon getting it, I discovered a fault in the onboard NIC, as it wasn’t letting me connect. I found out my warranty was managed by some seemingly random company, AMAX, and had a bit of a tough time getting them to deal with my problem as Trigem was going bankrupt, less than a month after I bought the computer. Once I finally got to talk with a tech at AMAX, he figured out there was a real hardware issue and I returned the computer for diagnostics and an eventual motherboard swap. And it only cost me ~$40 in shipping if I remember correctly. Everything worked as it should upon return.


Unfortunately the Kloss never got much use. My laptop was plenty sufficient back then and as it was with me all day, it was kept current. The Kloss languished and I eventually came to resent it somewhat. It’s was bit loud and it’s only gotten more so. Between the PSU fan, the rear 7 cm fan, the whinny video card fan, and the 92 mm CPU heatsink fan, there’s plenty of noise. And the 2.8 GHz Pentium processor (model # 520) didn’t help keep things under control in the heat department. I can get it to idle at 45 degrees C if it’s in a cool, well ventilated spot, but put it into an even moderately confined space and the idle temp will soar towards 60. I’ve also been trying to watch my energy consumption lately and the P4 Kloss sucks about 130 Watts at idle with the video card (compared to 60 Watts of the cheap ~$100 AMD Sempron-based PC I’ve built fairly recently). If I dump the cards (video and otherwise), disable just about every unused port in the bios and the like, I can get it down to about 90 watts. Using ‘Silent’ mode, a motherboard over/underclocking feature built into the Kloss with a button on the front, set to 50% (~1.5 GHz) I only saw about a 2 Watt saving over the ‘Normal’ mode, and maybe a slight reduction is ‘suck-hole’ fan speed (the least obtrusive of the fans).


The PSU sits right below where the expansion slots reside on the motherboard, and it seems it heats them up quite a bit. I get video crashes every once in a while (and quite easily under stress). I tried adding a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1600 at one point and while it worked better than I though for a P4 system with 1GB of ram and an older X600 Video card, it obviously was susceptible to the heat emanating from the PSU, as it would start to become unstable after a bit of use.


I haven’t really known what to do with the Kloss recently. It’s never been my ‘main’ PC and it isn’t even my current, primary desktop rig. It really just sits. I now think I’m going to pass it onto my parents. It’s not a current PC but it’s still a step up for them and more than they need really. Besides, they give their home PC such spare use that it will sleep most of the time, so the high power consumption shouldn’t be of any consequence.


I’ve pretty much come the resounding conclusion that while SFF PCs seem like a great space-saving idea, they aren’t, especially when it’s sitting unused because it has absolutely no upgradability. The Kloss’ design ingenuity that inspired the split thermal chambers ended up producing a custom motherboard that I can’t re-purpose elsewhere and necessitated a custom PC chassis that I can’t fit a modern motherboard into. Couple that
with Intel’s customer-unfriendly chip designs which won’t allow a Core series (core solo/duo, core 2 duo/quad) 775 socket chip from working on a P4/D series 775 socket compatible motherboard. The whole thing becomes a throw away box rather quickly. In that way, it’s like a laptop, but without the mobile functionality.

So I haven't mentioned what came of the twin 17" monitors (I think they were 17" rather than 19"... I think). At the time they were about $350 apiece. I ended up scrapping the 2 x 17" @ $350/monitor when I stumbled upon a $100 rebate on a Samsung 213T 21.3" LCD monitor for $700.

Photo grabbed from pcmag.com

It has turned out to be the just about the only saving grace from this build, along with not actually paying for it myself. I still use it and it's great. I'll write more about it when I write about my monitor experiences, which will also include a 19" Hanns-G LCD I scored for $126 and a 22" Westinghouse I picked up for $200+tax during a black friday sale in 2006.

Posted by technomancer at 1:50 PM
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