- Oct 9, 1999
- 15,216
- 3
- 81
Disclaimer: I bought the X7A for corporate use/testing, I had previously bought the X5A which I am yet to review (CES2013), but I'll chime in with that unit on the bottom.
Design
Pros:
Its a good design; a 4x4 inch cube, flow through case for ventilation, compact, tough industrial design
Cons:
Its noisy, it gets hot, and the case I can see get clogged with dust in an environment used for home theatre use. Also due to limitation of the design, you have to wait for xi3 to build upgrade panels so you may have an upgrade path. On a regular x86 machine, you can upgrade parts as you need to. More on this later.
Performance
Its pretty speedy for what it is. However XI3 has not been very open about its design and tech specs. The piston which was supposed to be Valve's big break into the living room with steamOS and hoping for the Piston to be the first of the steambox's, I think we all had our expectations that this is going to be a killer gaming machine. When I saw it at CES 2013, the expectations were that you had a machine that would look cool among your home theatre equipment and still run circles around lugging your big desktop.
Problem is XI3 did not really spec the unit to what our expectations were. I was a bit flabbergasted when I found out the 'Quad-core AMD Trinity Series processor up to 3.2GHz' is really not what we all thought it was. So the processor is an embedded (what else did you think it would be) AMD R series 464L, which is a 2.3 ghz processor that turbo boosts to 3.2 ghz. Problem is the base operating speed is 2.3 ghz, which wouldnt be bad, except this is equivalent to the A10-4600M processor from AMD. Couple the 35W TDP of a mobile processor, that period where you are going to be running at 3.2 ghz is going to be very small and only in short bursts. Since the processor is identical to the 4600M I believe, (and yes this is the same processor in the Piston), the ability to push the design of the chip beyond its 35W TDP (vs. the desktop trinity version which is rated 65W-100WTDP) is going to be limited. In fact Jason Evangelho wrote an article on the piston with similar conclusions http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonev...tely-as-powerful-as-xi3-wants-you-to-believe/
The other issue I have is from the marketing perspective of XI3. While they are utilizing the AMD trinity chip which comes with an embedded video card (in this case a Radeon 7660G), the card is not a discrete video card that they seem to indicate on their specs page of their website. The 384 programmable cores hints at a discrete GPU, but in fact its the iGPU. Which isn't a bad thing, but it gives quite a different idea in your head.
Thus the problem.... Under limited testing that I have been able to conduct, I saw the CPU temperatures quickly rise from roughly 113F (~47C) at idle (linux suse 12.1) to 177-185F (~80-85C) while watching a full screen 1080p youtube videos on a loop. This is a problem since XI3 is targeting couple of different markets at the same time. Besides the home theatre / gaming market, they are trying to corner the server market. They have a solution for a large scale implementation of their X7A's as servers and it includes a proposal for multiple units in one 4U case. I am just trying to imagine how much heat a box of 24 XI3 machines will generate. Cooling is going to be mighty important.
Our original reasoning for buying the XI3 was partly for use in a server farm at our datacenter. We'd like to use box of 24 machines with quad cores in a 4U rack to process our datasets. While the trinity chip design itself may be a limiting factor with 2 integer and one floating point calculation per pair of chips (there are 4 integer units and 2 floating point units per packaged chip) for high performance computing. Yet its something for us to consider in the long term viability of the device. It still may work, I am yet to throw prime 95 on it see how long it does against the other base line which is the Intel NUC with the 1.8 core i3 3217U and the newer NUC.
upgrade-ability
Since this was the first time I got to open either device, I chose to open the X7A. Partly because I am having an issue with the device. Its supposed to come spec'd with 8gb of ram, and while the BIOS and OS show only 4gb (4080mb reported) of memory, a secondary menu in the bios does show all 8 gb to be present. That said I decided to take it apart to see if there is anything loose or serviceable parts.
The good news is that the SSD is upgradable. My device came with a 64gb mSATA device from the factory, but the device is expandable with additional mSATA, as there is another port on the other end. The device also has extra pins on either corner of the add on boards that seems to indicate that one maybe able to daisy chain devices.
Apart from the SSD, everything else on this computer is soldered onto the motherboard. I found eight (8) memory chips that correspond to the RAM, they look to be from Micron, but I'll double check later. There is not much that an enthusiast can upgrade, however from a corporate standpoint, upgrading / switching out cards would make CPU upgrades pretty fast. As long as you have a 2mm allen wrench on hand.
What I do like is that the computer despite its size has 4 eSATA ports, 4 USB 3.0 ports and 4 USB 2.0 ports, and while the 4 eSATA ports play double duty as USB 2.0 ports, the addition of these modern interfaces makes it this computer a better value. I also like the two mini display ports and the combination Display Port / HDMI port.
Differences between X7A and Piston
So I asked the company to clarify the difference between the X7A and the Piston. Fundamentally they are both the same, except it seems the X7A has a 3 year warranty, while the piston has a 1 year warranty. Also the X7A has a enterprise class SSD, while the piston has a normal SSD.
Difference between the X5A and the X7A
The X5A and X7A are vastly different class machines. The X5A is based on Athlon x64 clocked at 1.8 ghz. While its a decent processor, its similar to the Desktop Athlonx64 6400 series at 1.8ghz from 2007 time frame. Its an older chip, but still capable for being used as a display controller or something. My version came with Windows 7 on a 32gb SSD and 2 gb of RAM. Honestly you cannot run any application on it since the SSD is the limiting factor. I'd assume the X5A has the same upgrade path / slots for an additional mSATA port, but that is for a later time when i take it apart. But knowing that the 2gb ram is probably going to be soldered on, there is not much one can do with the current configuration and hence it sits idle.
Pictures will come later on today. My internet was down all night, i'll upload it in 45 minutes.
Design
Pros:
Its a good design; a 4x4 inch cube, flow through case for ventilation, compact, tough industrial design
Cons:
Its noisy, it gets hot, and the case I can see get clogged with dust in an environment used for home theatre use. Also due to limitation of the design, you have to wait for xi3 to build upgrade panels so you may have an upgrade path. On a regular x86 machine, you can upgrade parts as you need to. More on this later.
Performance
Its pretty speedy for what it is. However XI3 has not been very open about its design and tech specs. The piston which was supposed to be Valve's big break into the living room with steamOS and hoping for the Piston to be the first of the steambox's, I think we all had our expectations that this is going to be a killer gaming machine. When I saw it at CES 2013, the expectations were that you had a machine that would look cool among your home theatre equipment and still run circles around lugging your big desktop.
Problem is XI3 did not really spec the unit to what our expectations were. I was a bit flabbergasted when I found out the 'Quad-core AMD Trinity Series processor up to 3.2GHz' is really not what we all thought it was. So the processor is an embedded (what else did you think it would be) AMD R series 464L, which is a 2.3 ghz processor that turbo boosts to 3.2 ghz. Problem is the base operating speed is 2.3 ghz, which wouldnt be bad, except this is equivalent to the A10-4600M processor from AMD. Couple the 35W TDP of a mobile processor, that period where you are going to be running at 3.2 ghz is going to be very small and only in short bursts. Since the processor is identical to the 4600M I believe, (and yes this is the same processor in the Piston), the ability to push the design of the chip beyond its 35W TDP (vs. the desktop trinity version which is rated 65W-100WTDP) is going to be limited. In fact Jason Evangelho wrote an article on the piston with similar conclusions http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonev...tely-as-powerful-as-xi3-wants-you-to-believe/
The other issue I have is from the marketing perspective of XI3. While they are utilizing the AMD trinity chip which comes with an embedded video card (in this case a Radeon 7660G), the card is not a discrete video card that they seem to indicate on their specs page of their website. The 384 programmable cores hints at a discrete GPU, but in fact its the iGPU. Which isn't a bad thing, but it gives quite a different idea in your head.
Thus the problem.... Under limited testing that I have been able to conduct, I saw the CPU temperatures quickly rise from roughly 113F (~47C) at idle (linux suse 12.1) to 177-185F (~80-85C) while watching a full screen 1080p youtube videos on a loop. This is a problem since XI3 is targeting couple of different markets at the same time. Besides the home theatre / gaming market, they are trying to corner the server market. They have a solution for a large scale implementation of their X7A's as servers and it includes a proposal for multiple units in one 4U case. I am just trying to imagine how much heat a box of 24 XI3 machines will generate. Cooling is going to be mighty important.
Our original reasoning for buying the XI3 was partly for use in a server farm at our datacenter. We'd like to use box of 24 machines with quad cores in a 4U rack to process our datasets. While the trinity chip design itself may be a limiting factor with 2 integer and one floating point calculation per pair of chips (there are 4 integer units and 2 floating point units per packaged chip) for high performance computing. Yet its something for us to consider in the long term viability of the device. It still may work, I am yet to throw prime 95 on it see how long it does against the other base line which is the Intel NUC with the 1.8 core i3 3217U and the newer NUC.
upgrade-ability
Since this was the first time I got to open either device, I chose to open the X7A. Partly because I am having an issue with the device. Its supposed to come spec'd with 8gb of ram, and while the BIOS and OS show only 4gb (4080mb reported) of memory, a secondary menu in the bios does show all 8 gb to be present. That said I decided to take it apart to see if there is anything loose or serviceable parts.
The good news is that the SSD is upgradable. My device came with a 64gb mSATA device from the factory, but the device is expandable with additional mSATA, as there is another port on the other end. The device also has extra pins on either corner of the add on boards that seems to indicate that one maybe able to daisy chain devices.
Apart from the SSD, everything else on this computer is soldered onto the motherboard. I found eight (8) memory chips that correspond to the RAM, they look to be from Micron, but I'll double check later. There is not much that an enthusiast can upgrade, however from a corporate standpoint, upgrading / switching out cards would make CPU upgrades pretty fast. As long as you have a 2mm allen wrench on hand.
What I do like is that the computer despite its size has 4 eSATA ports, 4 USB 3.0 ports and 4 USB 2.0 ports, and while the 4 eSATA ports play double duty as USB 2.0 ports, the addition of these modern interfaces makes it this computer a better value. I also like the two mini display ports and the combination Display Port / HDMI port.
Differences between X7A and Piston
So I asked the company to clarify the difference between the X7A and the Piston. Fundamentally they are both the same, except it seems the X7A has a 3 year warranty, while the piston has a 1 year warranty. Also the X7A has a enterprise class SSD, while the piston has a normal SSD.
Difference between the X5A and the X7A
The X5A and X7A are vastly different class machines. The X5A is based on Athlon x64 clocked at 1.8 ghz. While its a decent processor, its similar to the Desktop Athlonx64 6400 series at 1.8ghz from 2007 time frame. Its an older chip, but still capable for being used as a display controller or something. My version came with Windows 7 on a 32gb SSD and 2 gb of RAM. Honestly you cannot run any application on it since the SSD is the limiting factor. I'd assume the X5A has the same upgrade path / slots for an additional mSATA port, but that is for a later time when i take it apart. But knowing that the 2gb ram is probably going to be soldered on, there is not much one can do with the current configuration and hence it sits idle.
Pictures will come later on today. My internet was down all night, i'll upload it in 45 minutes.
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