News Sage launches AMD APU-based Gizmo microcomputer

Hear hear Gareth. Didn't read like that at all and it is appropriate. If Zin wants to go somewhere to read that type of thing and moan about it, pop off to TomsHardware for a bit. You wont make any difference, they are too well entrenched in making money, good tech writing disappeared there years ago. Thankfully it has only got better and better here.

 

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Intel® Desktop Board D33217GKE is available for €250. As a kit - intel DC3217BY - complete with an enclosure it's available for €275 allready.

Just sayin...

 

I'd honestly be more interested in a mini-ITX or smaller ITX board. More features for about the same price...

 

There's alot of miniITX-boards allready. Take your pick.

 

Except for often Toms do stuff more in depth than here... anything from gfx performance benchmarking for new games, browser reviews, investigations into things like microstutter and jitter with multi-gpu setups, investigations into where bottlenecks are, multicore scaling performance also in games and they generally just get more stuck into it than here. Although Anandtech and fast becoming TechReport are my favourites. I hate Bit-tech's cpu benchmark also.

This place is good for blogs, gaming reviews and the forum... and to have dedicated English perspective. For everything else there is mastercard or something...

 

The intel NUC has no option for a DVB-T/S dualtuner tho and that's where mini ITX and the intel DQ77KB comes into play

 

If you're interested in a small x86 PC, have you seen the Fit-PC? they make number of models from a tiny (10x11x3cm) atom PC to a 19cm x 16cm x 4cm i7 model (all passively cooled). I've used them for work and found them incredibly useful.

www.fit-pc.com

 

The Asrock one has been around for a bit. Newegg has discontinued it in Canada. NCIX still carries it but.. it's gotten too many bad user reviews (mostly BIOS issues).

As Combatus noted the Zotac board is FM1. Zotac announced the A75-ITX Wifi B-series but I can't find that anywhere either. (other than that archived announcement it's even gone from Zotac's site.)

Newegg also had an MSI A75 FM2 ITX board but that too is discontinued (and wasn't what I was looking for anyway - I really want dual link DVI or Display port.)

I believe that a lack of good FM2 ITX boards have really hurt AMD's APU sales.

 

I've sold those computers for 3 years in Israel. Actually I started my company specially to sell them. The product is great but the design is proprietary (i.e., their own form-factor and their own connectors, so very hard to extend/modify it), and even just opening the case voids your warranty. In addition, their customer service is awful: as a reseller I got more than 10% faulty units from them (I am talking about 10% reseller margin so those faulty units basically ate up all your margin), which I shipped to them for warranty repair, which sometimes can take a month, and a lot of the units were shipped back to me as is with statement "cannot reproduce the problem". So I thought maybe the units are actually good and it's just a problematic customer, but selling the same "good" unit to a second customer reveals the same problems reported.

I am not saying that other vendors have rock-solid quality and 0 failures, but with all Taiwanese companies I dealt with, their customer service was excellent and their replace/repair speed is literally days (and they really replaced/repaired rather than saying "cannot reproduce").