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Shuttle
SX38P2 Pro Barebones:
$499
www.shuttle.com |
Big Performance From An SFF
Most of the time, going with a small form factor system means giving up muscle in favor of density. Not so with Shuttle’s SX38P2 Pro, which incorporates Intel’s most advanced desktop chipset. The P2 chassis is compact enough, leaving ample room in front for a couple of externally accessible drive bays and enough room in back for gigabit Ethernet, eSATA connectivity, two digital audio outputs, plenty of USB 2.0, and FireWire.
More important than what is on the outside, though, is what Shuttle manages to cram inside of the SX38P2. There’s the X38 chipset of course, which is complemented by Intel’s ICH9-R I/O hub. And while you might expect the box to offer the standard pair of available memory slots, your enthusiast customer actually gets four slots to populate with up to 8GB of DDR2 800 memory. Drop any Core 2 Duo, Quad, or Extreme processor you want in there, too. Shuttle’s specialized OASIS cooling technology helps keep platform temperatures to a minimum so you can use the best 1,333 MHz front side bus CPUs out there without overheating. If that weren’t enough to drive the diehard performance fanatics crazy, Shuttle manages to fit two PCI Express 2.0 slots onto its custom board, enabling CrossFire multi-card rendering.
An assortment of other odds and ends adds polish to a very attractive platform foundation. An integrated biometric fingerprint reader, specialized USB speed-link technology, and a 450W power supply with an 80 PLUS efficiency rating are but a few of the system’s alluring extras.
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Lexar
16GB ExpressCard SSD:
$299
www.lexar.com |
Compact Storage To Go
Small business owners need more capacity than ever, and they’re buying the hard drives, thumb drives, and storage servers to make sure everything they own can be stored safely. Though they have access to 1TB disks on the desktop, the 2.5” drives found in most notebooks top out in the 250GB range. More common are the 120GB and 160GB capacities that were so popular until a few months ago. When it comes time to expand, or maybe just add a more convenient place to back up critical files, check out Lexar’s ExpressCard solid state drive. The thin card is available in several different sizes, but the 16GB model boasts the most wow factor.
There are a couple of cool applications for an ExpressCard SSD like Lexar’s. Because it connects via ExpressCard, which uses the PCI Express bus, the card has access to plenty of bandwidth and thus works with Microsoft’s Windows ReadyBoost to cache data in much the same way as Intel’s Turbo Memory technology. Drop the drive into a Vista notebook and help improve performance by allocating up to 4GB of its space to ReadyBoost.
Alternatively, leverage the Lexar Auto-Backup software to automatically save important files and folders. The card’s memory is non-volatile, like a hard drive, so it’s preserved even after disconnecting or powering down. You can’t beat the flexibility of disk drive performance in a form factor that’s easy to slip in a pants pocket.
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