{"id":1100,"date":"2010-01-25T22:44:04","date_gmt":"2010-01-26T02:44:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1100"},"modified":"2010-01-25T22:44:04","modified_gmt":"2010-01-26T02:44:04","slug":"the-sx280-comes-out-of-depreciation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1100","title":{"rendered":"The SX280 Comes Out of Depreciation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/01\/SX280onHC317Deck500Wide.jpg\" style=\"DISPLAY: block; MARGIN-LEFT: auto; WIDTH: 499px; MARGIN-RIGHT: auto; HEIGHT: 739px; TEXT-ALIGN: center\" height=\"739\" alt=\"SX280onHC317Deck500Wide.jpg\" width=\"499\"\/><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve changed my mind again; take note, and remember that it&#8217;s good practice. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=953\">I recommended the Dell SX270 here over the SX280<\/a> last fall. Having had some time to spend with a couple of SX280s, I&#8217;m thinking that the SX270&#8217;s day may be past.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been configuring and using Dell&#8217;s SX270 Ultra Small Form Factor (USFF) machines for several years now, and mostly I love them. They&#8217;re rugged, tiny, quiet, reliable, and come with a BIOS-locked version of XP Professional that does not need activation. (The disc can&#8217;t be installed on anything but a Dell SX270, and because every last SX270 out the door had a paid-for Windows instance on it, Microsoft figures they won&#8217;t lose anything by giving over WPA, and they&#8217;re right.) The SX270s were made and sold between 2003 and 2005, and given that they were almost entirely corporate fleet machines, five years later they&#8217;ve mostly been written off by their corporate owners and dumped on the resale market. That&#8217;s why they&#8217;re so cheap; a quick check of completed auctions on eBay right now shows dozens of units selling for between $60 and $100, and a few full systems (including flat panel monitor, keyboard, mouse, and the combo system unit\/monitor stand) for between $100 and $150.<\/p>\n<p>There are a nonetheless few downsides to the SX270:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>They&#8217;re limited to 2 GB RAM. This can be an issue, depending on what you&#8217;re doing with them.<\/li>\n<li>They use 2.5&#8243; laptop IDE hard drives, which are more expensive (and less capacious) than the conventional 3.5&#8243; drives most larger PCs contain.<\/li>\n<li>Their integrated graphics systems are not meant for animated video games, and the slower machines (slower than 3 GHz) do not render video very well.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In 2005, Dell replaced the SX270 with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dell.com\/downloads\/global\/products\/optix\/en\/spec_optix_sx280_en.pdf\">the SX280 USFF<\/a>, which is about 15% larger but still mighty small. The SX280 is a better machine in a number of ways:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It can take up to 4 GB RAM, though you have to be careful what you put in it. (More on this in a moment.)<\/li>\n<li>It uses ordinary 3.5&#8243; SATA drives, which means you can pack 1.5 TB into the little box for about $120.<\/li>\n<li>The integrated graphics chipset is faster and more versatile&#8211;if still not <em>quite<\/em> versatile enough.<\/li>\n<li>It opens up and field-strips a lot more easily than the SX270.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Until very recently, SX280s were fairly scarce and went for $250-$350 used. But a few months ago I noticed that SX280 prices were imploding, and they&#8217;re now as cheap (and in many cases cheaper) than the SX270, sometimes as cheap as $50. In fact, a week or so ago, a full 2.8 GHz system like the one shown above (which I will be installing in our parish office shortly) sold for $103, including the Dell HC317 17&#8243; monitor on stand, mouse, and keyboard.<\/p>\n<p>The SX280 is a little fussy about the sort of DDR2 DIMMs you put in it. Crucial has a nice lookup service for Dell (and many other) computers, and I ordered 2 2GB DIMMs from them. Go <a href=\"http:\/\/www.crucial.com\/store\/drammemory.aspx\">here<\/a> and look for the Crucial Memory Advisor. If you buy the ones specified for your model, they&#8217;re guaranteed to work, and mine did.<\/p>\n<p>Seeing SX280s cheaper than 270s is a little odd. It may be that the supply of workable SX270s is drying up; after all, they went out of production five years ago. Doesn&#8217;t matter; the SX280 is a better machine, and if you mount it on an HC317 stand behind the 17&#8243; monitor, it&#8217;s no larger than the similar 17&#8243; piggyback system incorporating an SX270. The HC317 stand is VESA compatible, so if you have a larger VESA monitor it&#8217;ll bolt right on.<\/p>\n<p>The big downside, as I&#8217;ve alluded to before, is that neither the SX270 nor SX280 will display a native 16 X 9 raster under Windows. I&#8217;ve tried to coerce the Intel chipset to do 16 X 9 to no avail&#8211;which is infuriating, since Ubuntu detects my widescreen monitor and somehow drives the Intel GMA 900 controller at 1600 X 900 automatically, with no input from me.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway. If you&#8217;re looking for a small and quiet officework machine for cheap, the SX280 just got cheap. Highly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve changed my mind again; take note, and remember that it&#8217;s good practice. I recommended the Dell SX270 here over the SX280 last fall. Having had some time to spend with a couple of SX280s, I&#8217;m thinking that the SX270&#8217;s day may be past. I&#8217;ve been configuring and using Dell&#8217;s SX270 Ultra Small Form Factor [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[15],"class_list":["post-1100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-hardware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}