- Mar 19, 2003
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I'm still chugging along on the reliable, but aging, 2.4GHz Athlon XP machine I built in August 2003. I want to do an A64 upgrade/new build soon (within the next two months probably), and an SFF would be quite nice. I would love to have a small machine to pair with my LCD (great for LAN parties ).
There are two things possibly preventing this from being as simple as I would like:
1) I currently own an AGP 6800GT
2) I just purchased a PCI HDTV tuner card
Now, you could say "just buy the Shuttle SN95G5 and be done with it", and that could work. However, lately I've been thinking - if I'm going to wait a few months to do a new build anyway, it's certainly possible that the new video cards will be out by then. And the trend seems to be going in the direction of PCI-Express. So if saving my current video card is not a concern...then the SN25P looks great. (I especially like the memory card slots, room for possibly 3 hard drives - and the nice audio solution/codecs they're putting in.)
The problem with that though, is the HDTV card I just bought. The SN25P doesn't have a PCI slot at all, which is really unfortunate. I could easily live with just one expansion slot other than the video card - but as far as I know, there are no PCI-Express HDTV tuners that are out, or have even been announced. And I wanted to get one anyway before that broadcast flag mess begins in July.
So basically...would you recommend that I just go ahead and get the SN95G5 - or is there an A64 PCI-E SFF machine that has a normal PCI slot (or alternately - a PCI-E HDTV tuner coming out soon)?
Thanks in advance.
There are two things possibly preventing this from being as simple as I would like:
1) I currently own an AGP 6800GT
2) I just purchased a PCI HDTV tuner card
Now, you could say "just buy the Shuttle SN95G5 and be done with it", and that could work. However, lately I've been thinking - if I'm going to wait a few months to do a new build anyway, it's certainly possible that the new video cards will be out by then. And the trend seems to be going in the direction of PCI-Express. So if saving my current video card is not a concern...then the SN25P looks great. (I especially like the memory card slots, room for possibly 3 hard drives - and the nice audio solution/codecs they're putting in.)
The problem with that though, is the HDTV card I just bought. The SN25P doesn't have a PCI slot at all, which is really unfortunate. I could easily live with just one expansion slot other than the video card - but as far as I know, there are no PCI-Express HDTV tuners that are out, or have even been announced. And I wanted to get one anyway before that broadcast flag mess begins in July.
So basically...would you recommend that I just go ahead and get the SN95G5 - or is there an A64 PCI-E SFF machine that has a normal PCI slot (or alternately - a PCI-E HDTV tuner coming out soon)?
Thanks in advance.