The Parts

Woe is me, the P4

Yes we have all heard that the P4 is about as quick as molasses. But even molasses gets quick once you get it hot enough. The early P4s were as slow as can be, especially for the price. While the price premium for an Intel processor is still there, the LAN Gear ES is quite a powerhouse. U-tron will also be offering their box with an 845DDR configuration. If something hasn’t clicked in that noggin of yours, let me spell it out. Combining the 845DDR or i850E with a lower clocked P4 Northwood does absolute wonders. Many people have reported running the 1.6A or 1.7A all the way up to 2.3GHz and higher. And yes - U-tron will be offering different speed processors.

AGP riser

CPU Heatsink

Cooling

This is one thing we definitely think is in the beta stages at the moment. While the system does run just fine, we experienced random slow downs when running benchmarks. Due to the fact that the Pentium 4 has a lovely feature that keeps the processor from frying itself in an orgy of processing power - the CPU steps down a notch, and nothing crashes. Our prototype LAN Gear ES was only equipped with passive cooling on the CPU (that's right, heatsink only), so in extreme external conditions, there were a few speed bumps.

Keep in mind that most of our work is done at night, when the evil building managers shut down the air conditioning to those who aren't willing to pay $60 an hour. Needless to say, we end up working in our skivvies, not exactly the primo place to test out a tiny gaming rig. This is nothing a few extra fans in the right places won't cure, and U-tron is working on it.

Video

The video card in the machine is a PNY GeForce3 Ti500. Not name brand stuff, but in the video card field, especially with NVIDIA, there isn’t too much difference between the various cards. The new GeForce4 cards might show some more distinction, but that remains to be seen. We’re also sure that U-tron will offer different levels of performance, most likely including the GeForce4 and friends.

Drives

Ports

Mobo

The current motherboard offered is not exactly the best thing on the market. Running with a stock Intel i850 reference board, this board is essentially devoid of frills. While the performance is there, any of the extra overclocking features are most definitely not. U-tron is currently in the process of hunting down more motherboards that would fit the bill for the power user. One prospect that seems promising is the Asus P4T-E in a microATX format. As we mentioned earlier, U-tron will be doing this all in an 845DDR format too. Which boards out there that fit the bill remain to be seen.

The drives

With a scant 20GB of hard drive space, this is definitely one system that won’t house your burgeoning MP3 collections. For gaming this fits just fine. If at any point you are running more than 15 GB worth of games, it’s time to rethink your priorities and possibly see what that thing called “outside” looks like. We’re also quite certain that different size drives will be offered. We’re really hoping that the Western Digital SE drive will make an appearance. With 120GB of storage space, and a 8MB buffer that makes 10,000-RPM SCSI drives envious, this is THE fastest IDE drive in existence.

Rear Fan Vents

Innards

The CD-ROM is something that belongs in a laptop; this was used because of space constraints. Although it does seem that a normal drive might fit in there just fine. We’re told that a laptop burner could easily become an option. On the floppy end of things, we have just that – a floppy drive. This could actually be ripped out entirely we think. With bootable CDs, we think that a gaming rig could hold itself decently with just a CD-ROM. If you have the skills with the network doohickeys, you could just dust all the drives but the HD, and opt for an over the network setup.