Mailing List Archive

"System approximately 205mm x 156mm x 61mm"
not quite 'the worlds smallest'. But yes, it should work for a front
end, but why would you pay that much for a system that cant hold a
tuner? ie, no PCI slot. Might as well just buy a EPIA, its smaller and
a lot cheaper and will work just fine for front end. In fact, the EPIA
M10000 can hold 2 PCI cards (with a riser) making it perfect for a
back/front end box. Dont get me wrong, its a nice P4 system, but its a
waste if it doesnt have a PCI slot. You dont need a lot of power to run
a front end only.

--Tom

IMHO, a nice little box, but it does have a couple of shortcomings:
First, it has no PCI slots; this limits your expansion options quite a
bit (the Pundit has two slots). It has no DVI connector (if that
matters to you).

It also apparently suffers from heat problems: I can leave my Pundit on
for days in a closed cabinet and it's still just warm to the touch.
This is the case now, it's been in the mid-90's to over 100 for the last
week, Pundit's been on for 4 days and its just warm. Of course, I don't
have a hard drive or CD in mine, both of which are major heat producers.

Besides, the thing is just butt-ugly (IMHO) <g>.

That said, it DOES have some nice features that I wish the Pundit had
included:

* SPDIF connector on BACK of case (grr)
* Realtek RTL8139A based NIC (ie: NOT broadcom)

If anyone does pick one of these up for a front-end, my lightweight
distro should work fine in it.

== Steve



On Tue, 2003-07-29 at 04:47, Mark Edwards wrote:
> just noticed this review, looks like a candidate for a front-end
> http://www.jsihardware.com/reviews.php?ID=32
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Has anyone seen the barebones reviews on Tomshardware?
http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20030722/index.html

I really like the MSI machine. A very stealthy computer. All have PCI
slots, and all support very fast Pentium 4s, so they can all be
backend/frontend machines.

Andy