DH Review: AMD Mini ITX System (featuring AMD BE-2350 CPU)

Zardon

Read The Review Here
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Could a system be built which would handle some light gaming, high definition playback and perhaps a little encoding, while being as small as possible? To find out we will be creating a mini-ITX system and looking at its stand-alone performance as well as testing it against a microATX motherboard of similar specification.

Jejking

In the review on the Gamingpage... the second graph (Tiger Woods 08) displays the CS: Source benchmark. So two times the CS: Source benchmark, I don't think that is quite right

Zardon

fixed. so what do you guys think of the CPU? tempt you back to AMD?

Tril

Looks like a nice case. Now you just need a faster cpu to get this system to play HD content without missing frames.

There's only one 80mm fan on the case. It must be a quiet system quiet. Is the fan speed controlled by the motherboard/system/OS?

I don't see a pic with the cpu and heatsink installed. Is there a fan on the cpu heatsink or is the power of the cpu so low that it can run without one, as long as the heatsink is big enough?

I thought it was possible to install an OS on a thumb drive. There are now some 16 GB thumb drives available on the market. It would generate less heat and less noise without an harddrive.

It's a bit off-topic from the subject of the review but how does the mini-ITX hardware on Intel side compare to AMD (high processing power, low power, playing HD-DVD and blu-ray disks, HDMI support, etc)?

Veridian3

HI, the fan is a standard 3pin affair and so connects to a 3pin mobo header. It really depends if that has fan control or not.

For the BE2350 CPU a heatsink/fan is still required. We used a low profile heatsink in this build (available from all good retailers ) from memory i think it needs to be 6cm tall or less (inc fan) to fit under the drive holder.

On the OS front, maybe its a Vista thing, didnt spend too much time on it really but the installer told me I was unable to do that and a few google searches backed this up so i didnt spend to much time on it. As with most PC related things there is probably a way around this but its not something simple by the looks of things.

Finally, regarding Intel, there are mini-ITX boards out there, infact some actually have 2xDDR2 slots which gives an advantage over the EQS one reviewed here. They tend to use the Q965 chipset and so lack HDCP support, HDMI and so on. And whilst you may be able to build a system which is in theory able to play HD content you may be stuck in the future when HDCP is required more. (The Intel board with 2xDDR2 and Q965 with core 2 support is also much more expensive... up to four times more expensive!)

IvanV

A very good review. I had no idea it was possible to build a system like this at such low cost. I wish they found room for the second memory slot, but it's not that big a deal. The integrated GPU's video acceleration is more of an issue. The average CPU usage during BR playback shows almost perfectly linear dependence on the CPU frequency (at 4/3 of the original frequency, we had 3/4 of the CPU usage), and even with a 2.8GHz CPU the maximum utilization was 92%. HD DVD, on the other hand was somewhat better, with 33% CPU frequency increase leading to a 40% average CPU utilization decrease, indicating that the chipset really was doing something.