ABIT Announces DigiDice Barebone

by Anton Shilov
09/15/2003 | 08:27 AM

ABIT Computer formally announced today its first barebone systems. Branded as DiGiDice, the novelties from the legendary company offer a number of advantages over typical small form factor systems. One of the main pros of the DiGiDice are expansion options as well as overclocking capabilities.

Following the latest trends in barebone fashion, ABIT’s DiGiDice utilizes consumer electronics-like design and probably can be mounted in a living room without sacrificing the whole view of the interior. Let us now take a closer look on ABIT’s DiGiDice layout and capabilities.

There are four buttons located on the upper left corer, a bit below the LCD screen. The keys are easily programmable inside Windows environment to run certain application. With one touch, users can play DVDs or VCDs, listen to CDs or MP3s, browse photos or copy a DVD/CD.

A little bit below the buttons you may notice a knob that is called “Overclock Navigator”. Users may use this knob for dynamical overclocking and speed tweaking in performance-hungry applications. Besides, users can still tweak the DigiDice for customized performance through ABIT Softmenu.

Below the 5.25” bays there is a panel with loads of connectors on it, including a FireWire port, 2 USB 2.0 ports, a card reader for Memory Stick and CF cards, plus a headphone/microphone jacks.

On the top left corner ABIT located a special LCD screen to monitor the DiGiDice, including such values as fan speeds and temperatures.

In addition to the kicking functionality, ABIT’s SFF PC features loads of expansion capabilities, such as two 5.25” bays for optical drives, two 3.5” bays for HDDs, a PCI slot, an AGP 8x slot for graphics cards and so on.

Check out the remaining specifications of the ABIT DiGiDice barebone:

• Supports Socket 478 Pentium 4/Celeron processors with up to 3.06GHz clock-speed;
• Can take advantage of the CPUs with the Hyper-Threading technology enabled;
• i865G chipset with ICH5;
• 2 DIMM slots for up to 2GB of PC2700 or PC3200 DDR SDRAM memory;
• Integrated Intel Extreme Graphics 2 core;
• 1 PCI slot and 1 AGP 8x slot;
• 1-channel ATA-100/66/33 integrated controller;
• 2 Serial ATA-150 ports;
• USB 2.0 ports;
• 2 FireWire (IEEE1394) ports;
• 10/100Mb/s Ethernet adapter;
• 6-channel AC’97 audio solution with S/P DIF support;
• 200W PSU;
• Chassis: 307(W) x 255 (D) x 215 (H);
• Cooling: OTES Cooling System with FanEQ control;
• IR receiver.

Pricing and availability were not determined, but we would expect ABIT DiGiDice to show up in two to three weeks in the market.