NEVER! I swore to myself that I would never buy one of these crappy, under performing Atom based computers. This was before I went to my local computer shop. They currently have really cheap and small Atom computers on sale, so I bought a complete Foxconn R10-S3 for around 120€. I already had a hard drive (500GB) and a memory stick (2GB) lying around, so it was a good opportunity to build a cheap computer to test Rawhide builds.
As you can see on the picture above, it’s a really small case in which you can fit an optical drive and 2 3.5″ disks. The whole thing is based on an Atom 330, which is a dual-core CPU running at 1.6GHz. As a desktop chip, it supports the 64-Bit instruction set. So I installed a 64-Bit Fedora 11 on it and I have to say that it works quite well…It’s perfectly usable to browse the web (even with Flash), listen to music and work on an OpenOffce document at the same time. Don’t expect much more as it will begin to feel sluggish…
One thing I don’t like about it is the integrated fan…it’s loud. In fact it’s as loud as my quad-core computer when it’s idle, which frankly sucks on a small computer.
Hello,
can you say anything about the power consumption of the Foxconn R10-S3. I think the 150W power supply is totaly oversized. I would like to use this computer as a NAS System with Webserver and mediastreaming, so it should run 24h/7d.
Regards,
Michael
Hi, I haven’t measured it, but 150W is totally oversized…as the hardware is similar to any other Atom platform out there. As http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Atom-Athlon-Efficient,1997-5.html suggests, it shouldn’t exceed 50W at full load.
Is the size of the case big enough to house a pci card (TV/capture card for example)? I’m asking since the mainboard does have a PCI slot but the case’s height is only 10cm. Thanks for any info
I don’t have the box right near me, but I’m pretty sure that you have to buy a low-profile PCI card.
For anyone still interested, at normal/casual load with one HD I measured around 15 watt power cosumption (60-65 mA @ 220v).
hi! i’ve one of this barebone. i’ve a question about PCI slot.
the spaze for the pci card is a little more of 5 cm, but without bracket or with a low profile bracket.
my question: i’ve mounted an adsl modem pci, that apparently works great, but the download speed is only 80-90Kbps. the same pci card on other pc have 700Kbps of download speed.
this tested with debian 5 on both computer.
someone have strange problem with pci socket?
any advice is appreciated