Silence of the PC Lambs

It seems that the alternative to the "greed for speed" mentality in the IT industry is being somewhat displaced by the "small, integrated and silent" class of boxes.

Last week at IDF, Intel was pushing the concept of new fans, new case designs and the like, and for the last six months Via has touted its Information PC and most recently the Eden box.

Both of these result in smaller boxes - or as the marchitectural boffins would have it, smaller form factor platforms. The ITX and now the mini ITX have fewer moving parts, reduced power needs, and so there's less heat and consumption. Shuttle has introduced its AV24, which also is based on a similar philosopy.

Now Signum Data has developed a completely different method for tackling heat and noise in PC designs.

I've had a machine for the last three or four days and it seems to me Signum has managed to tackle both these problems and largely beat them.

If you're fed up with the white/grey box approach or cheap inexpensive attempts to mImIc the iMac, the machine looks pretty good to us - we score it nine out of 10 for appearance.

It wouldn't look out of place in the operating theatre, on a CEO's desk, in the morgue or in the living room. The case design is the key to how the machine works, when you apply a scalpel and peep inside, it's obvious that it's made to dissipate CPU heat, has a fanless power supply unit and takes away heat from the hard drive.

These are main heat and noise monsters in any PC system.

The case is completely made from aluminium - a light metal but this unit is heavy because there's a lot of metal, petal.

Mr SID Future Client will take a 70 kilogram load on the top, and this and other stress factors make it a rugged unit. It might not be built like a tank but it's fair to say it's as solid as a Mercedes Benz.

The machine includes high quality, mostly shielded cables and components, laid out neatly and unobtrusively - and it's already won an IF Design Award for 2002. Stick a 15-inch TFT screen on the top and you've a neat little system.

Future Client currently supports versions for Socket 370 and Socket 478 CPUs, with a version for AMD's Athlon and Duron Socket 462s almost ready to roll, the firm says.

The CPU is downcalmed using a liquid cooled pipe extending into the aluminium case fins, which is bound to take the heat away from the fiery chips of this world.

The machine I reviewed came with a 933MHz C3 CPU which didn't really tax the ability of the cooling engine.

THe chassis support the Flex-ATX or Micro-ATX design, with on-board video, LAN, sound as well as standard USB, and comes with serial and parallel connectors. It has two 32-bit PCI slots, with support for different kinds of hard drives. What happens when you plug Mr SID Future Client in? The first time I did so, it was a trifle disconcerting and just a bit spooky - and that's the way I like it.

A permanent blue light around the power button indicates that the power is on, and bar the POST check-beep, otherwise every thing is silence! A tiny, muted rattle can be heard as the hard disk starts to boot the OS - in this case Windows XP, and there's a red LED near the reset button to show Mr Winchester is working.

This is a little different from the usual sound of fans bursting into life and a low level persistent hum which every PC user knows.

The only reminder you get that there is life in the PC is the blue light near the power button. It's so quiet that at first you keep checking the light just to reassure yourself that the machine is alive.

The quietness of the machine actually makes other activities like installing software from CD, or copying files from the floppy drive seem strange, noisy experiences - these devices make more noise than you realise, normally muffled by the regular hum of the living PC.

But once you get used to the way this machine works, it becomes an absolute pleasure to operate. Music CDs, DVDs and the like don't have to played as loud as there's no noise to drown out, so maybe this kind of design would be useful as a home entertainment system.

Does it work 24 hours a day, seven days a week? Well, I replaced the German version of XP with the English version and threw on a few benchmark utilities and SQL 2000 desktop onto Mr Hard Drive.

This isn't really a gaming machine so SID FC has to be stable, combined with reasonable business level performance. I ran the Sisoft Burn In wizard for 36 hours without any problems, and also threw a heap of SQL import/exports for several hours, without anything nasty appearing in the aluminium shed.

There will be a Pentium 4 2.2GHz version of this machine, but I wouldn't say it's a speed freakers dream - just a solid reliable workhorse.

It is worth mentioning here that it is not a "speed freaks" machine (I would like to see the 2.2GHz P4 version though!) - not designed to be, just a solid reliable workhorse.

I can see many different kinds of uses for this machine in many environments - industrial, business, medical, in fact anywhere a PC exists today. Any company that runs 10s, or 100s of PCs may find there's a serious business case for evalutating the Future Client. Although it has a higher up-front cost, the long-term payback of reduced power bills alone may justify the expense. Added to this, the environmental advantages of a quiet machine and the recyclable ally construction may be deciding factors.

You can find extra spex and pictures of the machine here . µ