This is what it looks like with the front cover on. This cover is almost entirely grille to provide adequate airflow. There was little evidence of heat except through the louvres at the top where the power supply board is, as this is passively cooled by airflow. It has the supplied stand fitted on the bottom which is designed to allow airflow through another set of louvres; it also comes with a VESA mount bracket to go on the back of a display. I have installed Win8 Pro 64 bit and am still testing things out and haven’t completed playing with the unit but it is basically ready to do something with. Whether that something is a HTPC or a small portable PC is yet to be determined. I imagine from here we will do some testing to see that it is capable of doing a lot of different things and then take it from there. For now it has to go into the cupboard as I have a lot more stuff to do over the next few weeks with unpacking the house and getting ready to go back to work, it’s going to be a big year in 2015. So a great start to the year with this little wee computer. The next few posts will be a comparison with the T5720 thin client, the NUC and with Silverstone’s MILO series as alternative case types. Anyway the only noise you hear is the internal fan and the newer Gigabyte boards with passive cooling will be virtually silent.
Total cost of system approx is as follows:
- Chassis with power supply $125
- Motherboard with onboard CPU $150
- 4 GB memory $75
- 2.5” Scorpio Blue HDD $100
- TOTAL $450
So that is not bad at all, $450 for a PC (without an OS of course) and it only takes up a little space and is really portable (a biggie for me with limited transport options). In my case I already had all the parts except the chassis making it a really useful upgrade of an existing computer that was sitting in a big tower chassis. It has 8 USB ports, and can drive 2 displays – VGA and HDMI.
