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| ASUS Pundit SFF à la ASUS | ||
| (Review by MS, August 19, 2003) |
Summary
The currently hottest market segment in personal computing is the small form factor genre. Everybody and their brother appear to run and try to get a slice of Shuttle's XPC pie, albeit with little market presentation so far. ASUS is using a different approach, instead of imitating the chubby little cubes, elegance prevails as the most dominant exterior factor of the Pundit.
Inside the Pundit lurks a somewhat outdated technology in form of the SIS 651 memory and graphics controller in conjunction with the SIS962 South Bridge, a chipset that has been introduced almost two years ago. Performance, though, is not necessarily the biggest selling factor of a book-size SFF, entertainment centers often live and die by the simplicity of installation and AV quality.
Does the Pundit have the wisdom of its namesake to fit into this role? We took it apart, put it back together and captured a few pictures on the way, which, however, are only part of the grand scheme of things. Read on ...
Small form factor systems have been the latest and certainly one of the greatest trends in last year's PC business. Shuttle computers is the undisputed market leader in the new genre despite some severe efforts by even tier-1 manufacturers like MSI. Part of the success of the XPC is based on Shuttle having been the first company to push the concept and gaining market penetration while everybody else was still dreaming. "While you were sleeping" also allowed Shuttle to refine the concept and slap some of their major improvements with patents to quench any attempts of plagiarism before they would even reach maturity. Otherwise, words like royalties and licensing fees would be the subjects of legal paper work.
ASUS Pundit Book Size Barebone System
I am not sure what size books they have at ASUS, this one is more like a double-sized phone book
Any specialty design, more so if it is successful defines a rather narrow "design space" around the proven concept. It is not surprising, therefore, that the cohorts of followers all look very similar to the original Shuttle XPC, there is not much that can be changed in the design of a cube unless the square is changed to a circle, the solutions provided by Iwill, Soltek, and MSI are testimonials to the truth of this statement. In other words, the problem is, how to build an SFF system that looks like a duck, walks like a duck while avoiding the "quacks like a duck".
The problem can be avoided by radically changing the design and moving to a more conventional slimming-down of the original PC, or rather, to take the slim-line concept and stuff it with some really powerful ingredients. Needless to say that this requires some major adaptation / custom builds of the entire hardware. The result, depending on the designer's capabilities can be something that is either elegant or dull but keep in mind that beauty, as always, is in the eye of the beholder.
When the first XPCs saw the light of the day, the responses were not unanimous either, some called them toasters, others called them plump, nobody called them beautiful and yet, everybody loved their chubby charm. Take the same concept and try to mold it into something elegant .... the risk is going to be losing the oddball charm but let's quit theory and delve right into the Pundit. Merriam-Webster defines a pundit as follows:
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