SPCR

Overall, we have to give AOpen credit for creativity and branching into a market no other PC manufacturer has. The Mini PC lacks the refinement of a Mac mini much like comparing a Chevy to a Cadillac—with the Chevy being the Mini PC. It needs to be updated with ATI’s Xpress 200, high definition audio, SPDIF, a better software bundle, and made quieter to be considered a better competitor among the general consumer, silent PC and home theater PC enthusiasts. If AOpen were to at least fix the noise issues we would have no problems recommending it to users looking for a silent PC or file server—until then we can't recommend it except for the cool factor.

It was quiet as far as decibels are concerned but the single blower fan makes a high pitched whine that is very annoying. The whine is very annoying when the system is powered on and the Smart Fan hasn’t kicked in yet and produces upwards to 67dBa [measured very close, I am sure] of noise. When the Smart Fan kicks in the whine gets quieter but it’s still noticeably annoying. There were points during testing where I couldn’t bear the whine any longer and had to turn the system off for a while.

davidstone28 wrote: 1. How difficult would it be to replace that blower fan with something quieter?
2. Given that the graphics performance is completely hamstrung (eg. no 720p playback), is the price of Aopen mini going to reflect that?

One thing that did surprise me about the Mac mini was the noise level, both good and bad. Most of the time the machine is very quiet, basically silent; I expected more regular fan noise given the cramped quarters inside the box. On the other hand, under the heaviest extended loads—ripping a number of CDs in a row while performing other processor-intenstive tasks, for example—the fan ramps up to a surprising volume. Nothing compared to the wind tunnel levels of a crashed Power Mac G5, to be sure, but louder than I expected. Similarly, the Mac mini’s optical drive is about as loud as its PowerBook cousin—it can get noisy when ripping songs in iTunes. (Thankfully, it’s nearly silent when watching DVDs.) http://www.macworld.com/2005/01/news/macminihandson/

Want to hear your Mac mini rev up to Jet Engine decibels? Simply browse any website with a Flash animation, or even move around Google’s new DHTML map service, or, most annoyingly, play World of Warcraft. There’s reasons there are that many air-holes on the back of the box. Are you reading this on a Mac mini and want to test it? Here’s a great page to try, KDDI’s phone catalog at http://www.au.kddi.com/photo_catalog/index.html. Within seconds of bringing that page up in Safari or Firefox on my mini, the fan starts revving up to full speed. As soon as I close it, the fan slows down. This wouldn’t be a big deal if the fan was a bit more quiet, but it’s not. It’s a full-on blast which at night sounds like you have a an electric heater turned on. And I thought my Toshiba laptop got loud sometimes, I had no idea.

It seems a bit extreme - just putting even a little stress on the mini revs up the fan. It doesn’t seem to be for heat, but for processing speed. The more processing power needed (like for interpreted languages), the more the fan revs. My notebook just turns on long enough to cool the system down and then shuts off. The mini, however, turns the fan on whenever it *thinks* it might get hot, and that’s annoying. The direct response to certain events (as opposed to being random) makes me actually avoid certain activities. And when I’m opening tabs in the background from my aggregator, sometimes I can tell when I’ve hit a page with a Flash ad because the mini starts up. I’ll actually stop what I’m doing to find that page and close it quickly, it’s that annoying. http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008309.html

Powered by a quiet 1.73-GHz Pentium M 740 processor, my $700 test system came with 512MB of DDR2 RAM, a 40GB hard drive, and a slot-fed SuperMulti DVD burner.

Because this was a preproduction unit, we did not run it through our WorldBench 5 suite, but in my informal tests the MiniPC seemed perky.

davidstone28 wrote:....then the Mini seems rather pointless. Not powerful enough for 720p as well as being expensive.

Other than looks, whats the advantage of something like the Mini over say the Beblu?
http://www.beblu.net/gallery

At the projected price point, I personally think AOpen will have a hard time convincing consumers why they should pick the AOpen mini PC over the Apple Mac mini, especially with Apple's uber marketing team.
http://www.sfftech.com/news/index.cfm#2

Apple's Mac mini will be reborn as the digital hub centerpiece it was originally conceived to be, Think Secret sources have disclosed. The new Mac mini project, code-named Kaleidoscope, will feature an Intel processor and include both Front Row 2.0 and TiVo-like DVR functionality.
http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0511macmini2.html

Right now a $999 list price iBook sells in volume for something closer to $699 and earns a small but positive margin for Apple. The PowerPC G4 in that machine has a typical volume price of around $72, or about 10% of the selling price for the machine. In comparison people like Asus, Quanta and Hon Hai Precision (who make Dell, HP, and IBM gear) pay Intel on the order of $240 per unit for the two year old, 32bit, 1.8Ghz Pentium M predecessor to the "Yonah" line.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/index.php?p=479

EDIT: AOpen Mini PC Barebones Sighted: http://www.shentech.com/1071565sn.html

Found a la Froogle.

The HP's flaw though - no DVI

...I have heard this while at work, and damn this thing really is quiet.