DescentBB

Mr. Perfect kindly suggested that I look into these for my son. They take up very little physical space but can be very powerful and fast. They are also supposed to be very amenable to upgrades.

I heeded Tetrad's advice on avoiding the expense at Alienware and did a search on small factors. This article on ExtremeTech forum seemed very good in a lot of ways.

Do I understand them correctly, are they saying that some small factor builds would actually be difficult to upgrade?

Also what do you think of the system that ExtremeTech built? Would it be overkill for someone who wasn't an uber gamer?

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1 ... 208,00.asp

Because small factor PC's are custom built to be small, most new stuff you will buy won't fit in them. More likely the montherboard since it will not conform to the small form of the case.

Thanks for replying Merlin

Yes. While these Small Factors are way cool, I'm thinking you are right.

I didn't consider the flat screen that I am staring into at this very moment. He doesn't need that much desk space for a screen and a keyboard. Doh!

So now I am back to desktops. I'm going to post in the original thread now. Sorry for the jumping back and forth!

Motherboards are custom made for these lil guys, generally by Shuttle or a handfull of others specializing in this field.

A SFF PC will be trickier to upgrade then a full size desktop, but imensely easier to upgrade then the notebooks you where looking at earlier. I think notebooks are generally limited to RAM and HD upgrades, while you could probably swap out most any part in a SFF as long as it wsn't to large or drew to much power.

BTW, I noticed in the other thread that you where looking at a SFF with a X300 video card. Those cards are definetly "entry level", and don't perform very well. If your son wants to play newer games like FarCry, Half Life 2, or something current like that a Radeon 9600 XT, GeForce 5900 XT or something higher up would be much better(exluding LEs and SEs, which are considerably cut-down).

By the way, have you built PCs yourself, or do you need one pre-assebmled? Here's a link to Shuttle's line of pre-assembled gaming rigs. There's plenty of other models, so poke around the site some.

Mr. Perfect...Thanks so Much!

I know this will sound like BS, but it's absolutely true: I had typed a long response to you and the darn power cut out just long enough to crash my computer. Now, I have to clear the rubble from my house so that my kids can have friends over tonight. I'll rewrite the reply in the P.M. when said kids and friends are busy reducing the house to rubble yet again.

Mr. P

In the interim, here's some replies I got in the ExtremeTech forum which will probably interest you more than my ignorant post anyway :

http://discuss.extremetech.com/extremet ... g=53500.29