Small Form Factor Face-Off! We Compare 5 Compact Contenders

Posted 05/16/2011 at 12:12pm | by Gordon Mah Ung

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Small Form Factors: The Final Analysis

How a controversial winner emerges from a field full of surprises   

Believe it or not, a showdown of full-size super PCs can get pretty boring. What you usually end up with is five systems all packing the same internal components.

But a contest among computer makers that restricts physical size? Now that seemed bound to yield some interesting results. Just as any race sanctioning body, such as NASCAR or FIA, sets weight limitations or adds restrictor plates, we thought that by limiting vendors to the simple term “small form factor,” we’d rein in the out-of-control system specs and benchmark-crushing performance that we see with full-size systems.

Our plan worked and it didn’t. It worked because we received an incredibly diverse set of machines that show what can happen when you’re thermally and spatially constrained by a SFF rig. Our plan didn’t work because the machines we got blew our mind in specsmanship. We really did not think it was possible to cram as much hardware into such small machines as the vendors did here.

CyberPower’s LAN Party Evo impressed us with its size, power consumption, and capability. It actually serves as a good zero-point for the kind of performance you get out of the prototypical small form factor machine. As we said in our review, it’s enough firepower to keep most of us happy, and when you consider its small footprint, who can complain? And yet it gets no cigar and shouldn’t. The other rigs’ performances were simply superior.

Next we had Falcon Northwest’s FragBox. It’s not much bigger than the CyberPower machine, yet it packs GTX 580s in SLI and its P-series chipset allows for some overclocking. Its main limitation is its size. Like the CyberPower, the size imposes a thermal ceiling on the rig. There’s no thermal headroom to run this generation of dual-GPUs in the FragBox, nor crank the processor clock very far. While we feel the Falcon is the best of bunch for folks who are severely space-constrained, the quad-GPU configs rip up the GeForce GTX 580s pretty handily. Of course, Falcon could have opted to add more fans and increase airflow, but we’re kind of glad it didn’t.

That’s perhaps a lesson that AVADirect and Origin PC should have taken to heart. Instead, we suspect the builders decided to throw caution to the wind in their pursuit of victory. In performance, both boxes are certainly fast—fast enough to put some full-size boxes to shame.

AVADirect’s use of the overclocked 990X is perhaps that machine’s most eyebrow-raising feature. Well, that and the use of the Radeon HD 6990 cards. The HD 6990 cards have a reputation for being loud—a reputation that’s well deserved, we discovered. Ultimately, that cost AVADirect serious points.

Similarly, acoustics were a serious failing with Origin PC’s Chronos, which was even more obnoxiously loud. Part of that may come from the innovative Silverstone case. With the AVADirect, the loud-as-hell 6990 cards at least have the audio directed out the back. With the Silverstone, the audio emanates from the top and the side panels, which makes it sound even louder.

With Origin and AVADirect penalized for audio, that left iBuypower’s LAN Warrior II as the last man standing. From what we can see, the GeForce GTX 590s can be kept running at lower fan speeds if you have enough fresh air moving over them. With the NZXT Vulcan case, a massive 20cm fan ducts external air directly onto the GTX 590 cards. The LAN Warrior II is certainly not quiet, mind you—especially when compared to the CyberPower LAN Party Evo or Falcon Northwest FragBox—but the fan whir is fairly low-pitched and more comparable to a standard full-size gaming machine.

The LAN Warrior II’s performance numbers are certainly all smiles. It’s a smidge slower than the Origin PC Chronos in the Heaven 2.5, STALKER: CoP, and 3DMark 2011 benchmarks. Application performance is also competitive, but not the best.

The only issue we have with the LAN Warrior II is its size and shape. Even though it has the same volume as the AVADirect and Origin PC rigs, its shape is closer to a mini-tower than a small form factor. In that respect, is it a fair competitor to the more conventional Falcon and CyberPower SFFs? In the end, we decided that philosophical arguments aside, the fact remains that the iBuypower LAN Warrior II is not only a fine machine but the overall winner in this contest.

SFF vs. Full-Size Desktop: Fight!

Can small be the new standard for power users?

If you’ve seen the specs on the machines in our roundup, you know that you can indeed stuff a lot of hardware into a smaller-size machine. But is it enough to sway you from building a full-size desktop for your next build?

We’d say probably not. We have much respect for the vendors’ ability to cram all manner of performance parts into these machines, but there are still compromises inherent to SFFs.

The most obvious are thermals. The two smaller SFF rigs here don’t have the thermal chops to run dual-GPU cards. And two of the three machines here had to run their fans at such excessive speeds that it’s not worth it.

But what about performance? We decided to compare the SFF rigs against the Maingear Shift Super stock—a state-of-the-art desktop that’s reviewed on page 70 of our July issue. With its CPU running at 5GHz, the Shift SS is faster than the fastest of the SFF machines, from 5 percent to 10 percent.

Even better, the Shift SS is very well behaved. The machine can run two dual-GPU cards without having to crank the fans to maximum speed.

Noise and performance aren’t the only things to consider when looking at a desktop though. There’s also serviceability—how easy a machine is to work in. The Origin PC Chronos is actually very serviceable, but the rest of the SFFs here have so much hardware crammed into such a small space that wrenching on them is a major undertaking.

The final category is obvious: expandability. All of the SFF machines are pretty much maxed out on hardware. There’s no option to add a soundcard, additional hard drive, or secondary optical drive.

A full-size desktop machine has space to grow into. Let’s not even mention that finding Mini-ITX or microATX motherboards with enthusiast features is very difficult. Yes, SFFs certainly have power and capability previously unimagined, but they still aren’t as versatile, powerful, or serviceable as that dinosaur, the desktop PC.