I picked up yet another small form factor system again yesterday.

And boy is this one SHINY!!! Size wise well... it's a small form factor unit for generic parts (instead of custom made ones) so here's a size reference shot.

I basically needed a system for file archival purposes, so I threw in the cheapest 160GB Seagate SATA drive I could find, an added plus of the Seagate HDD is that it's slimmer than other 3.5" drives... or maybe that's how big they are right now?

The casing (and motherboard) that I got from Ifician has enough space for one 3.5" hard disk, a floppy drive and a 5.25" drive.

The board I got is an Intel D945GCLF2, it's one of those boards with everything built in and all you need to get it running is to plunk in a stick of ram and a drive.

The board is interesting because it has the Atom 330 processor on it, which is essentially a DUAL CORE Hyper threading enabled Atom processor. Which means you get to see 4 processor bars when you bring up Task Manager in Windows. Which is cool.

The Atom 330 is more than capable of handling your typical day to day computing tasks of web browsing, office work, etc. etc. But I was also interested in checking out video performance. Cause the board comes with a S-Video out port which means it is possible to build a simple media playing PC from this unit.

After a few tests, the 330 seems to be adequate to play most 720P HD quality videos (as long as you're not pulling them from the network)  Just forget about 1080P videos and you'll be ok. Then if you need better sound outputs, well... there IS a PCI slot on the board.