[Xeven]

I'm currently looking for desktop PC's with very small form factors. I need to stack at least 16 of them and they need to fit on a small rack. How small? As small as possible. Also, they must have decent enough performance. The original specs of the design requires at least 3.2Ghz procs (or AMD equivalent), 1GBIT lan card (as high-end as possible), at least 1GB memory, don't care about the vid card, don't care about the cd-rom drive, at least 120GB harddrive and 1or2 PCI slots.

I've been looking around and all I've managed to dig up so far are small form factor, slow-ass pc's. So please help me, cause my boss is gonna start chewing my ass if I don't get a prototype up soon Cost should be at most $3K each. Also posted on some "hardware" forums, but I dunno maybe some of you guys can help

 

[Kane]

You could try looking at a half-height desktop case with a mATX nForce 3/4 board like hte BIOSTAR K8NHA-M or the MSI K8NM-FISR, and then attach a cheapy half-height graphics card to it.

 

[hushypushy]

i remember seeing a thing like this, where a guy built a bunch of computers on a rack. they were ITX motherboards and he just attached them to a rack. cant remember the site though..maybe it'll give you hope.

 

[Valcrist]

Does it have to be a PC? Cuz You can get A mac mini that fast with 1.25 gigs of ram for about 900 then you would have to buy hdd's for them but that would only cost you about 200 a piece at most putting you at 1100-1200 for each one, and they would run better than a PC anyway . And they are TINY.

 

[Xeven]

At the moment they have to be PC's, the image processing/correction/computational library's are all coded x86, you at the moment there is no choice. If you're wondering what they are for, I need to do some computation on massive amounts of data. Imagine trying to do error correction on 8, 14 megapixel sensors (16 bit pel) running at 8000 frames per second. That translates to around 2 terrabytes of data per SECOND. If 16 units will be too slow, I'll probably add another 1x16 cluster -_- I saw really thin clients on HP, but they're transmeta I'm also looking at your suggestion Kane, but it seems the height of the chassis for those boards is around 8 or 9 inches, I'm not sure that's thin enough. Tnx.

 

[Kane]

Would this case not cut it then?
I suppose you'd need to find a short HSF too then....

 

[D.D.]

how bout prebuilt rackmount servers?

i think stuff like this : http://www.visionman.com/products/category.php?id=6&cat=1U Solutions

http://www.aberdeeninc.com/abcatg/scmain2.htm

 

[Xeven]

I'll call visionman, see if they have viable solutions. Tnx.

 

[Xeven]

my god -> http://www.littlepc.com . I wonder if these things don't heat up like an oven -_- for the P4 at least.