Aleutia H3: a Real Dual Core CPU, 4GB RAM, and One Fan…possibly passive.
A lot of applications can only use two cores and so it's better to have 2 fast cores (2 x 3.0GHz) than the four slower cores of our energy efficient H2 (4 x 2.33GHz). For the H3, we're using a new AMD processor (AM3 socket) as it offers better performance than the Pentium and Core 2 Duo processors. AMD is like Avis - they're number two, so they try harder.
Specifically, it's a Athlon II X2 250 (2 x 3.0GHz CPU). Unlike an Intel Atom 330 this is a real processor and more than capable for gaming or HD Flash playback.
We'd love to passively cool this but it's not possible in such a small case so we are shipping it with a large heatsink and single, slow fan (speed can be set in BIOS) that will be extra quiet. Drive options will be 40GB hard drive (7200RPM, quiet, and cheap) or 32GB SSD. 4GB of 1066MHz RAM (our fastest yet!) as standard.
We have been working on a Single Core AMD Sempron 140 solution as this is a 45W CPU and not a 65W CPU. And it's a beast (not your mother's Sempron!) but again it's too hard too passively cool as the video above shows. As soon as you remove the fan, temp jumps to 70 and then 80 C.
Our only hope is to use something like the Scythe Ninja, which is huge: 5 inches (or 120mm) cubed. So for now the spec is:
- Onboard Nvidia Geforce 8200 (1080p is no problem)
- H1/H2 Case
- AMD Athlon II X2 250 CPU
- 2 x 2GB 1066 MHz Kingston RAM
- 12V DC Input (PicoPSU)
- 102W External AC Adapter
- 40GB or 250GB 7200RPM SATA-II Drive or 32GB KingSpec or 64GB Kingston SSD
Amazon UK will be listing the 64GB Kingston Spec which will retail for £449 ex VAT or £516.35 with VAT and shipping in the UK.
World’s Lowest Power Windows Home Server: Fanless, Atom CPU, 2GB RAM, 750GB Hard Drive, and Gb Lan for £279
The Aleutia T1 has quickly become our top-selling PC since its general release in August. We sold nearly 100 in September and as it shares the exact same chipset as our F5 we have decided to phase out the F5 and offer the T1 with a new 750GB Drive laptop drive that uses only 2W, for total power consumption of just 18 Watts.
That means you get a fanless server with only one moving part (the hard drive), practically silent, and with 2GB of RAM and a Gigabit network port for a mere £279 ex VAT (£320.85 including VAT). Designed to be a perfect file or print server or host some light web traffic. Fully compatible with Windows Home Server as well - though it only has one drive and so isn't an ideal WHS box. We're releasing a new 4-bay Hotswap NAS for that purpose soon, the N1.
Samsung P2070 EcoFit 20″ 12V LCD – Slim, sleek, and Perfect for Rural Africa?
When you produce solar power, it's DC (Direct Current). Most electronics and computer components run on DC, usually either 5V or 12V. But since The Grid is AC (Alternating Current), they come equipped with power supplies that go from 100-240V down to DC. That's why your laptop has a "brick" power supply, switching the power from say 230V AC to 19.2V DC.
Our computers are all 12V or, even better, 6-26V DC. This means they can receive power when the batteries are low (and output is about 11V) or use truck batteries which are 24V.
The problem is monitors always have an AC "brick" built inside so if you are on solar power you have to use an inverter and go:
- From Solar > 12V DC Battery > AC Inverter (up to 23oV) > AC Monitor > Back down to DC components inside monitor.
Wasting 10-15% of power you go from AC to DC or DC to AC. Ideally you could just bin the AC power supply of the monitor and go:
- From Solar > 12V DC Battery > DC Monitor
Samsung appears to have done with this with their new P2070 monitor though the reason for making the PSU external is to make the monitor extra thin.
Schools in rural Nigeria are probably the last thing on the minds of Samsung engineers but it's so much less expensive than the crappy 12V 10" 800 x 600 Chinese monitors that sell for £150 to £200 on eBay and Car PC websites. And it doesn't require difficult linux drivers like the USB monitors do.
It actually has a great spec: 20", 1600 x 900 Resolution, 2ms response rate, 50,000:1 Contrast Ratio. I'll have one in on Monday and post the video review next week. It only has a DVI port which means it will work with our best-selling Aleutia T1 and our H-Series but not crappy thin client type PCs like the Inveneo or Linutop.
HTPC Blu: Blu-ray Drive, SP/DIF Optical Audio, 4GB RAM, Intel E6300 £399
Our new Home Theatre PC, and smaller than a shoebox. We've combined powerful onboard Nvidia 9300 graphics and a Blu-ray drive with DVI, HDMI, Optical and Coaxial Audio out (as well as a legacy VGA ports.
Every other HTPC out there seems to be Micro ATX isntead of Mini ITX and Blu-ray is always an optional upgrade. What's the point of having a 1080p-capable PC if you have to speed a week on Bittorrent downloading a 20GB Blu-ray rip? Blu-ray optical drives should be standard and it is on ours. Otherwise, just buy a dedicated sub £100 media player (though their interfaces are usually terrible).
The limitation of mini-ITX and small PCs is it can be difficult to sqeeze in an extra graphics card. With that in mind, we've gone with some of the best onboard graphics available, the Nvidia 9300. And instead of using a dual core Atom processor, we're fitting it with a new Pentium Dual Core E6300 Processor, with 2 x 2.8GHz CPUs, FSB of 1066Mhz, and 2MB of L2 Cache. http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SLGU9
Combined with 4GB of RAM, that makes this a tiny HTPC that you can actually use for gaming and general multi-tasking. All for just £399 ex VAT.
Kingston SSDNow V Series 64GB Review, Bonnie++ Benchmark
We love SSDs, particularly the Intel X25-M 80GB which I've blogged about before. But that's expensive (£134 wholesale) and now Kingston's released the SSDNow with pretty solid write speed of 80 MB/s and a nice 64GB capacity. eBuyer, Overclock.co.uk are selling these for about £92 ex VAT and wholesale is only 12% less.
Boot Time: From Grub to Usable Desktop it boots in 24.0 seconds.
Bonnie++ Benchmarks (all in MB/s):
Sequential Character Output: 11.609
Block Output: 21.171
Rewrite: 10.513
Sequential Character Input: 12.184
Block Input: 130.831
Random Seeks Per Second: 5119
Basically the Samsung F3 hard drive crushes it and offers 8 times the space at one third the price, i.e. the Kingston SSD comes out 24 times more expensive per GB. However, at Random seeks (access time) it's 29.5 times faster which is kind of crazy. The Samsung 3.5" hard drive, by contrast was just 1.3 times faster than the 2.5" Fujitsu Drive.
Samsung SpinPoint F3 HD502HJ 500GB Review, Benchmarking
We really, really prefer SSDs here at Aleutia HQ but occasionally some excitement comes into the "moving parts" end of the storage business.
I was a big fan of Samsung's F2 Eco Drives: silent and just 4.5 Watts. But they were only 5400RPM. The F3 is 7200RPM and offers outstanding performance.
If you want to compare to your own drive, then open a terminal in Ubuntu and type:
sudo apt-get install bonnie++
Then (make sure you are NOT root):
bonnie++
Needs a few gigabytes of free space and takes about 15 minutes. I have a screenshot of the whole process here.
Results (all in MB/sec):
Sequential Character Output: 71.295
Block Output: 137.215
Rewrite: 39.671
Sequential Character Input: 54.493
Block Input: 154.679
Random Seeks Per Second: 173.0
As you can see it's 3-5 times faster than a 7200RPM Laptop drive like the Fujitsu we benchmarked recently.
I knew desktop drives were faster but since the industry only markets spindle speed and cache (and 7200RPM laptop drives have 16MB cache as well) I had no idea how much faster they were!
Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala (AMD64) First Impressions, Boot Time
NB: Hope the cheesy wallpaper doesn't cause anyone to think I'm a Maxim reader: it's a top result on google image search for "Ubuntu wallpaper" and I found it too nerdy to resist!
Now that Beta's been out for 24 hours I downloaded the AMD 64 Bit Edition for my Aleutia office PC. This is (relatively) energy efficient box made from discarded parts we've accumulated during testing: an Asrock A780GM-LE mATX motherboard with an AM3 240 CPU (2 x 2.8GHz, 65W), 4GB of Kingston RAM, SATA DVD-RW drive all in this nice mATX case (lower profile but otherwise similar to the one we use in our U6 Userful PC).
You can upgrade to Karmic from within 9.04 by typing:
Alt + F2
and then:
update-manager -d
Update Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release '9.10' is available. Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.
I did this but then it wouldn't boot so I decided to download the Beta version (final version released at end of the month) and install afresh. This is probably best as a major feature of Karmic is the ext4 filesystem and you need a fresh install for this.
These are mere first impressions but the Beta is very polished (think Windows 7 Release Candidate) and makes good on its claims. Immediate benefits:
- Very rapid install time (this is great for system builders like us)
- Boot time is faster.
- Nice colour scheme and very cool bootup screen
- Ubuntu Software Center (in place of Add/Remove software)
- Built-in logic games
- OpenOffice 3.1 (ok not that big a deal)
- New icons (particularly like the swiss army one)
ext4 and other fundamentals aside, it's clearly an evolutionary upgrade. But, like me, you operate in the cloud or have your files backed up, then you might as well though you could wait til RC comes out.
Aleutia E3 Discontinued: eBox-4310, eBox-3310 (eBox-3300) or NorhTec Microclient Jr. DX
To all considering a DMP eBox, I'd strongly recommend the T1 which is fanless and 12V but has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU (N270, same as in Netbooks), up to 2GB RAM, SATA-II SSD, and is still VESA-mountable. All with power consumption of 14W.
http://www.aleutia.com/products/t1