Exploring The Cybernet Elite II Zero Footprint PC
You can guess which one I found more interesting. I'd really wanted to find one for a while, but somehow never thought to check eBay. I even gave thought to buying one new from Cybernet Manufacturing. I never did so and then I dropped into eBay to see if anyone had one for sale. I was rather surprised when I found one, as I've never ever seen one of these in the wild over the ~12 years I've been involved with computers.
The Elite II is a Pentium III model. Mine has a 1.2GHz rated Pentium III-S Tualatin CPU. At first, the computer appeared to be unable to run this CPU any faster than 660MHz (5x133). This really was due to the system BIOS running the processor and system clocks in a sort of safe mode. When I configured the base clock and multiplier correctly, the CPU took off like a shot at 1.2GHz. (This CPU was actually pulled from some Compaq server.)
WARNING: This page contains many pictures that might take a while to load on dial up or other slow connections. Please plan your visit accordingly! Oh, and by the way...this page is in no way afilliated with Cybernet Manufacturing. Some information presented here was found out through experimentation on the hardware in question. What I did worked for me--it may not work for you and could cause six foot flames to shoot out of your system.
If you've never seen one of these and would like to take a look around, read on:
Here's the start of the show. This is what the unit looks like from outside. As you'd expect, we have a keyboard, status indicator lights for the various "lock" keys and a power button. What you might not expect to see are stereo speakers (the grilles at the left and right of the case) and a row of status lights that suggest this thing is more than meets the eye. From left to right, the lights are:
The ACPI indicator blinks during POST and whenever a non-ACPI capable OS is running. It turns on solid when an ACPI aware OS is running.
Cybernet Manufacturing technical support responded promptly to my request for a manual. Ask them if you need one.
Yes, there is a floppy drive. (Oh, YES!) On some later models, this appears to be either an option or completely unavailable. I'm glad this system has one. It didn't work out of the box, but cleaning revealed the problem when a large dust bunny left the drive.
This does appear to be the one weak spot of the system. The plastic bezel of the floppy drive is easily gripped and not very sturdy. Mine has been broken once by someone. It still fits but is rather loose.
Looking on the back, we have the usual assortment of ports (yes, there is even a keyboard port :-)). There's network, two USB 1.1 ports, keyboard, mouse, a fan (not really a port, but...), a TV out (!!!), parallel port, a blank slot for a fax modem, one VGA port and two serial ports. The second serial port is marked as being used as a possible second VGA out. There's also a PCI expansion slot. Cybernet says you can't use the PCI slot with an optical drive in place. I don't have the optional riser to test this theory.
On the bottom there is nothing terribly exciting...a few vent holes offer a tiny peek into the case, but that's about it. There is also a tape-covered Windows XP Professional "Certificate of Authenticity". I had my doubts about its validity, but Microsoft was content to accept it when I installed Windows and went through product activation. So it is at least "valid enough" for my purposes.
Four screws open the unit...and now we can see what makes it so heavy. (And it is heavy. You'd be surprised at how sturdy the majority of this thing really is. It can't hold a candle to the PS/2 it is sitting on, but it isn't a wimpy 99% plastic clone-boxen type of system, either.) The base frame is made entirely of metal.
The PCI expansion slot looks promising at first glance, but upon opening the case, it appears that some kind of a carrier or adapter (that I didn't get!) is needed to make use of it. An 802.11a/b/g card would go into place really nicely here...
You can see the optical drive suspended from the keyboard. The processor is also quite easy to spot.
Here's a high resolution (1024x768) shot of the mainboard with the keyboard and optical drive detached.
To save a little bandwidth and make for a quicker loading page, you can look at the mainboard up close in steps:
It's something of an inside joke, but here's proof that it is very hard to escape from the influence of IBM:
Here's the last picture...a shot of the back of the keyboard assembly. You can see the speakers, a small keyboard controller PCB, a PCB for the indicator lights and the DVD/CD-RW drive.
Hardware Specs:
Mine is equipped as follows:
Power comes from a laptop style power brick that delivers 12 and 5 volts over a four pin connector. The power output (per the label) is rated at 6 amps total. This seems kind of light, but I've been able to run distributed.net around the clock and watch hours worth of DVD video (yes, it will do that now that the CPU is running at the right speed) without issue.
The SiS video is nowhere near as bad as I thought it might be. I haven't had great experiences with SiS integrated video, so my hopes weren't too high. This SiS video system, however, seems to work really well. It doesn't have the oomph to run 32-bit high color at 1280x1024...you can only get 16-bit color at that resolution. Allocating more RAM to the video subsystem (64MB) didn't help, so I guess this is a limit of the video system itself.
It is also worth noting that this system does have a PC speaker in the form of a little piezoelectric "squeaker can" on the mainboard. I think that's a nice touch, especially after considering the number of PCs that have no beeper at all any longer.
SpeedFan (and Fan Control In General)
The Elite II does report temperatures, SMART data and other information that can be collected by the SpeedFan utility. It also will let you slow down (and stop!) the one fan it contains. Fan speed control doesn't start to take effect on either of my Elite II's until you hit the 40-45% mark.
Colors
Black is the most common, but a white variant does exist. I have one in white, and the owner's manual shows pictures of a white one.
Actual Manufacturer
The OEM for these appears to be HeiSei Electronics. This data comes courtest of the Public OUI database maintained by the IEEE. I fed the MAC address from both my systems into the OUI search tool and both came back the same. HeiSei's web site did have pictures of their own version of the Elite II.
As far as I know, the manufacturer of the Pentium 4 Cybernet PCs is not HeiSei. I haven't actually gotten my hands on one, but the design is radically different and there is no parallel product on the HeiSei site. (Update--HeiSei Electronics updated their site and removed the pictures of their PC-in-a-keyboard offering...)
Performance:
So, how does it perform?
Well, everyone has a different idea of what constitutes good performance in a computer. Once running at the right clock frequency, operation smoothed out noticeably. DVD playback (which hadn't worked well at all before turning up the clock speed to the right setting) is very possible.
For web browsing, word processing, data entry and other "office work" this system seems to do very well. It could benefit from a faster hard drive (the Deskstar it came with tops out around 11MB/sec transfer, and gets between 8 and 9MB/sec transfer in realistic use) but that's not a serious problem. The lack of USB 2.0 might bother some people, but it doesn't worry me at all.
The sound is really quite loud. You wouldn't think that the two little 1 watt speakers could make much sound. I didn't either, until I heard the Windows XP startup sound play from across the room! That got my attention.
All things considered, I'm very happy with the performance. I have had thoughts of expanding the RAM, although 512MB seems to be sufficient so far.
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