Introduction

Very small Atom/ION nettop machine, bought for server duties.

Form

It really is small, and hard not to be impressed. From a crude measurement I could fit 40-50 of these within my desktop case. Horizontal orientation is more flattering as the large stand makes it look bigger when vertical.

Attaching/removing the stand is fiddly. Case is basic plastic. Front flap covering USB ports is awkward and I have some concerns on how well it will last.

Power supply is of the external brick type and takes a C5 "Cloverleaf" power cable. Supplied cable was actually a US 3-pin fitting with a US-to-UK travel adaptor which is naughty. It would be nice if the power cable didn't have a sticker saying "7A 125V" on it as well. Yes, on 230V the current is halved so it's the same thing, but it looks bad.

Hardware

Ruvo Minicap 7 with cover removed

Summary

Confusingly, Ruvo use the name "Minicap 7" for both the non-ION version (white case, passively cooled) and ION version (black case, actively cooled).

Power consumption

33W average, measured at the plug when running. 7W in standby.

Opening

Removing the case required taking out 6 screws, including 2 behind the front panel flap. The case then requires (gentle) levering open.

Heat & Noise

Device will start up at around 33°C with the fan in low speed mode which is fine - around 58db at 0m. Slowly the temperature rises to around 72°C where the fan into accelerated mode and at this point the noise is an issue. The noise itself is much louder, around 64db at 0m, and the tone is also distracting. Firstly the case gives the sound a certain whistling quality and secondly rather than being constant, which you could block out, the sound is always varying which draws attention. This is caused by the fan accelarating and declarating around the target temperature giving a haunting effect.

The rise to 70°C is regardless of the load on the machine. With a machine at 99% idle, the CPU throttled down to 192MHz and no disc access it still hits this temperature. Once at 70°C it will never go below. Flat out (cp /dev/urandon /dev/null) the noise goes up to around 76db.

This is not a quiet computer, when loaded it's significantly louder than my full-size Core 2 Duo desktop. The whole thing gives the impression of a machine which is struggling to cope with the heat, even if it is within a normal range. I suspect the case design, which originally housed a passively cooled non-ION Atom board, isn't really suitable for the hotter ION setup.

Whilst briefly using the installed Linux distro I noticed some Nvidia related speed controls. It may be that with specialised driver support the temperature, and therefore noise, is better controlled.

OpenBSD

Used with version 4.6-release. dmesg

What works

Doesn't work

Windows XP

Couldn't install with a SP2 disc. The install would complete initial loads, but then blue screen just before drive partitioning. Slipstreming a SP3 install disc solved it.

At time of writing the current nForce chipset drivers are 15.46, but for me these didn't work with the onboard networking. Installing the net driver from 15.42 worked.

For the audio you'll need to install the high-definition audio drivers from Realtek.