I grunted when lifting Stratitec’s CPUBuilders mini-tower PC out of its shipping box — not because it was heavy — far from it. I was expecting a hefty load, only to find that the CBS324LC model must literally be the least massive system I’ve ever encountered. Yet despite the trim appearance of the chassis and the absence of leaden components inside the tower, the Athlon-based PC is no computational featherweight. In fact, it’s very well suited to the high-end of the home or small-office/ home-office (SOHO) mass market.
First, the hardware. The base system delivered to Linux Magazine consisted of the minitower chassis, an AMD Athlon XP, one 256 MB DIMM (there are two sockets), two 33 MHz 32-bit PCI slots (one containing a modem), a 10/100 Ethernet jack, four USB jacks on the back, and ports for keyboard, video, mouse, serial, parallel, and video. There was also a 1.44 MB floppy, a 40 GB IDE hard drive, and a cool, multi-function media reader that can directly accommodate four types of digital-camera memory: CompactFlash, SmartMedia, SecureDigital, and Sony Memory Stick. The system I tested had a 52X CD-ROM drive, but the company also offers versions with CD-RW drives — a must-have for everyone but the most basic user.
The CBS324LC is no high-end workstation, but the Athlon XP 2200+ microprocessor, which runs at 1.8 GHz, is right up there with Intel’s desktop Pentium 4 processors. And…
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