the ultimate farm builder!!!

[zangler]

check this out guys http://www.hwextreme.com/reviews/barebones/sv24/

i saw it at newegg for $250. it would be perfect for building a farm.

[TC]

I have one - it's not too bad.

[zangler]

Originally posted by TC
I have one - it's not too bad.

i see that....what were your toatal cost for getting it up and running? shipping and all.

[TC]

Well I already had a hard drive and ram, but I paid $100 for the cpu on Ebay and shipping was about $20, so in my case the total was about $370. It takes about 7 hours per unit.

[zangler]

that is not too bad for the price....i wish it could take an athlon though.

[TC]

I know there are some micro atx athlon boards, and possibly a flex atx. I think the major hurtle with an athlon is heat and power draw. The heatsink supplied for the SV24 is merely a half inch thick. The fan is a slim profile. There's literally no more room to clear the pci card - if you choose to use one. I put in a geforce 2 mx pci card to give me a little boost in video performance over the built in savage, but you could leave the pci slot empty and have room for a larger hsf. Even if you could get a decent hsf for an athlon, another issue is case ventilation. The single 60mm fan doesn't move much air. You could use a delta, but the noise would be awful. Lastly the power supply is a mere 140 watts. I'm not sure how well it would work with a power hungry athlon.

[Jon]

If looking to build some little "mini-crunchers" I'd wait for the EPoX 8KHM to come out. Micro ATX board based on the KT266A chipset with no riser slots, 3PCI, 2DIMM, CMEDIA sound and a 4X AGP slot.

No word on how it's going to overclock or if it'll have many options for it but I'd say it'll have something to play with since it has the standard Award BIOS. Probably has the ability to be volt modded too, but who knows?

Give us something to look into later for a mini-budget (if the price is right, of course) cruncher...

[TC]

Sounds interesting. The main strong point of this SV24 is that it's all ready to go for the most part - just pop in a cpu, ram, and hdd and you're up and running. Finding a case is not that big a deal, but I thought it was really convenient to buy a mobo and psu already installed in case, and just plug in a couple other things. If anything it certainly cuts down on setup time. I guess the more I think about it, it's not that great - the size kinda suckered me :D Before I had a server tower on my table. Yeah it was more powerful and a LOT louder, but this does a fine job, clears my desk off, and it's fairly quiet. As much as I hate to admit it, it's kind of cute :p