All-in-One PCs

[tea for two]

Wonder if anyone ever thought of making a laptop with a fully removable screen?
I love the portability of my lappy, but find it SO much easier to do music on the desktop with its 2 23" screens.

Prior iPad launch , I had a modular laptop concept with removable screen :
to save waste & resources (pretty steep) : I'm sure millions folk had same idea
I shelved it as soon as I saw iPad.

Then Google few years ago bring out their modular phone concept.
Perhaps someone will takeup the modular laptop.

[tea for two]

Thunderbolt 3 (includes USB 3.1) through USB C makes mini pcs more viable for power users.

Theoretically

https://thunderbolttechnology.net/blog/thunderbolt-3-usb-c-d...





Gamers : "connect plug ‘n’ play external graphics" (Intel Skull Canyon NUC mini PC taking advantage of this)
Audio : "lowest latency"
Networking : "10Gb Ethernet connection between computers"
Power : "Up to 100W system charging, 15W to bus-powered devices"
Daisy chaining : "up to six devices"

:::::::::

Various reports stating demise of PCs since tablets :
figures bear this out at least amongst general folk (regardless of pronouncements from Michael Dell).
Probably due to PCs seen as dinosaurs amongst general folk generally unaware apparently of mini PCs.

Were mini PCs main staged henceforth there may well be a revival.
Certainly they are up for performance with Skylake i7, Thunderbolt USB C.
Cuteness in living rooms, adventurous case designers drawing admirers.

[Pete Kaine]

I'm not overly convinced as far as general purpose home systems go with NUCs.

All our growth is in the verticals and SOHO is dead, a market that ate itself consumed by Dell & HP's race to the bottom and everyone who tried to compete went out of business in the process.

The average home user wants to watch Netflix, write e-mail and lurk on Facebook, all of which can be done on a £100 tablet. With the improved portablity, low cost and long handy battery life, that's a no brainer. If you choose to include tablets under PC's (and essentially they are by definition, and for pundits to seperate them, is missing the point) I dare say computer ownership is at an all time high.

Tablets can offer the same performance PC's had 7 - 10 years ago, just in a smaller, more convient footprint. The average user doesn't need more performance than they had at that point, so why spend the extra on something that's got less functionality, at least from their point of view.

In fact for all the branding we do with trying to push NUC's into the home, it's the office enviroment where we see them shift. Small, cheap, powerful unit which can do multiple monitors and be screwed onto the back of a monitor out of the way. Perfect for hooking up to a network and running Excel & Word.

In the home enviroment however, if you take tablets out of senario (which removes the average user), the senarios are not NUC friendly.

Media Server? = Not enough storage.
Media Extender? = Atom or ARM based media box.
Gaming? = Not enough performance, with the occasional product marketed for this being either far to hot to be stable, or no more capable than a laptop (and not as portable).

They really are stuck in a no-mans land right now with the home market. Every time I go and spec one up, I realise the is some other method of doing things that makes more sense. From Intels perspective it made sense to go after the low cost, home market, because the big boys had already run off all of the smaller firms who used to compete. What they neglected to take into account was the shifts in the market when trying to target it.

[CS70]

Anyone got any practical experience or verifiable reportage?

I've occasionally put my hands on a Lenovo something. In general, they work fine. Whether or not they fit your functional and requirements and aesthetics/physicality of use, only you can know.

For what you say you do you certainly don't need much processing power. So long you're reasonably sure that your requirements won't change, and you like the price, why not indeed.

Where it comes to reliability, these things come with warranty like anything else, and as most electronics the likelihood is that they either fail quickly, or will inevitably fail at some point in the distant future. In the first case, you're covered by warranty, in the second the likelihood of failure should be pretty much the same for all electronics, and what matters nowadays with computers is not so much that they can be repaired, but that the money you're gonna lose anyway is as little as possible. In that sense, the cheaper the kit that allows you to get the work done, the better.

So rationally the only reason for not going for them is that you need more power, you don't like the ergonomics or you find something cheaper.

[Exalted Wombat]

Yesterdays crop of spam email included a spoof delivery note from "PC World", apparently I had ordered an all-in-one PC. Coincidence, or shall we build a conspiracy theory?

(What IS in the doc files attached to such messages?)

[Pete Kaine]

Without having the urge to open one to find out, the are a few outcomes I'd place bets on.

1. Runs a macro in the background to do something.
2. Triggers an embedded .exe to run in the background.
3. Places a remote call back to an outside server.

In any case the outcome is likely to be same and involve some kind of remote access connection being opened, either by leveraging the inbuilt applications or installing it's own, followed by your IP being relayed to a hidden IRC channel somewhere on a Russian server.

If your lucky they'll only use your machine as part of a botnet, which they can sell access too on the dark net.

If your not, they'll raid your drive and use the data obtained to start opening up your bank accounts.

[Gazzamundo]

Hi, haven't seen many answers to the original question, so...

I bought a Lenovo B50 all-in-one last autumn - and yes, it was from Currys/PC World. As far as I know, Lenovo has a decent reputation as a manufacturer, and John Lewis's was selling the same model, so that's good enough for me!

Anyhow, it's a 24" touchscreen, think it's an Intel Core i7 (I'm at work, so don't have the details to hand), 8GB RAM, 1TB hard drive.

Pros and cons: it looks nice(!), frees up floor and desk space, it works. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed in the performance, it didn't seem any better than my old Cyberpower PC that it was replacing. I think that was mainly down to my old PC having an SSD, whereas the Lenovo comes with an HDD. I soon replaced the HDD with a new SSD (a relatively painless process), and am now much happier with the performance.

I think the only downside is connectivity, in that it came with 3x USB2 and 2x USB3 ports. I should've counted, as I really needed a few more ports, but easily rectifiable by buying an external USB hub (though I still have to swap the occasional cable round). An unexpected bonus was having HDMI in and out sockets, meaning I could hook up the 24" monitor from my old set-up with absolutely no mucking about. Oh, there's another thing - the 24" display on the Lenovo actually appears to be a little smaller than my original 24" monitor.

In summary, I'm happy with the performance now I've upgraded to an SSD - I run sonar X3 - a couple of dozen audio tracks, several VST effects and the odd VST instrument - quite happily. Though maybe I'll miss the old days of upgrading components every year or two.

Hope that helps.

[Martin Walker]

I think the only downside is connectivity, in that it came with 3x USB2 and 2x USB3 ports. I should've counted, as I really needed a few more ports, but easily rectifiable by buying an external USB hub (though I still have to swap the occasional cable round

A couple of years ago I bought myself a iPad Air (for a complete change of scene ), but have been horrified that its I/O (a single Lightning socket) requires one to buy a £25 Lightning to USB adaptor before you can plug in anything MIDI.

Despite some very positive and useful features on the iPad, after this stark reminder of how Apple behave when they have you over a barrel price-wise, once again I'm happy that I'm a mainly PC sorta guy

Martin

[Mike Stranks]

That'll teach me...!

Having said that what I've got at the mo was perfectly adequate, I had to do a mix last weekend which required more plug-ins than I'd normally use... Definite clicks and pops...

So it's a new desktop i5 for me once I've got this house-move sorted.

[tea for two]

Voyo V3 :£160 Gearbest Europe

Mike this just released really taken my fancy due to specs quite a way beyond typical.
May have just latest Atom Cherrytrail Quad x7 8700 :
Nevertheless for non processing just recording, basic cutting pasting .... I coped with Pentium 3 700MHz for audio recording.

I would check it out for you Mike (latency, performance) however these days I just haven't spare resources.
as I would have to get a touchscreen monitor (Voyo V3 outputs 4K).

Perhaps Pro DAW persons : really appreciated.

:::::::

(To add : it's not the fault of Atom : Korg Kronos basic Dual Core Atom does the biz on its custom Linux.
Sooner audio software hardware makers agree on a custom OS based on Linux
breaking free from OSX, Windows, better long run).

[Mike Stranks]

Voyo V3 :£160 Gearbest Europe

Mike this just released really taken my fancy due to specs quite a way beyond typical.
May have just latest Atom Cherrytrail Quad x7 8700 :
Nevertheless for non processing just recording, basic cutting pasting .... I coped with Pentium 3 700MHz for audio recording.

I would check it out for you Mike (latency, performance) however these days I just haven't spare resources.
as I would have to get a touchscreen monitor (Voyo V3 outputs 4K).

Perhaps Pro DAW persons : really appreciated.

:::::::

(To add : it's not the fault of Atom : Korg Kronos basic Dual Core Atom does the biz on its custom Linux.
Sooner audio software hardware makers agree on a custom OS based on Linux
breaking free from OSX, Windows, better long run).

Thanks, but I'm suited!

A second-user Scan desktop is waiting in the wings, pending me getting this house-move sorted and settled!

... but thanks for the thought.

[tea for two]

http://liliputing.com/2016/04/gigabytes-latest-brix-mini-pcs...

Latest Skylake chipset Gigabyte Brix


Includes
Thunderbolt 3 through USB C port :
marked as USB 3.1 as this USB C port supports USB3.1

https://thunderbolttechnology.net/blog/thunderbolt-3-usb-c-d...
As in the diagram a few posts above
Thunderbolt 3 supports PCIe 3.0
= lower latency audio, two 4K displays, 100W to power charge devices,
10Gb Ethernet, external gaming card, daisy chaining six devices & USB 3.1 :
all from one USB C port.

Data transfer:
If a Thunderbolt 3 device is connected we can get *theoretically* 5GBytes/s (40Gbits/s) data transfer.
If a USB 3.1 device is connected we can get *theoretically* 1.25GBytes/s (10Gbits/s) data transfer.

Currently closest to 5GB/s data transfer are NVMe SSD that use PCIe 3.0 interface.
Eg Samsung SM951 M.2 PCIe 3.0 NVMe NAND SSD *upto* Read 2150MB/s, Write 1550MB/s.

&

Intel's XPoint Optane SSD (Pete mentioned this) writes data *upto* 2GB/s

Sloooow SATA3 interface VS NVMe interface

Difference between NVMe NAND SSD & NVMe Intel XPoint Optane SSD

http://wccftech.com/intels-3d-xpoint-memory-featured-optane-...



(Difference compared to SATA SSD would be far starker).

Whilst being "1000x more durable than NAND SSD"…

(One thing to bear in mind .... there are NVMe that use sloooow SATA 3 interface).

::::

Intel Skylake chipset :
Tablets, Ultra Notebooks, Ultra Small Form Factor computers as Gigabyte Brix
should start seeing Thunderbolt through USB C port alongside internal PCIe NVMe either NAND or Intel XPoint Optane
(Some high end tablets, Ultrabooks already have PCIe NVMe SSD).

For audio :
Recording gazillion tracks at low latency, streaming mega samples (Hans Zimmer) more of a breeze internally as well as externally 
Once if when Thunderbolt3 audio cards & Thunderbolt 3 NVMe SSD external storage devices appear.
withOut requiring power supply.

(Thunderbolt 2 audio cards already available
eg. Apogee Symphony, Focusrite Clarett Pre  & Saffire Pro, MAudio DeltaBolt 1212, Motu 828X, RME Fireface, Universal Audio Apollo Twin Solo),

[Pete Kaine]

TFT - You mentioned Optane, although the links are pointing at current generation Brix systems. Optane requires I/O controller level support and that isn't being implemented until Kabylake arrives later in the year as far as I'm aware, or have you spotted something in the specs that I've missed?

(Thunderbolt2 audio cards already available compatible with Thunderbolt3
eg. Apogee Symphony, Focusrite Clarett Pre & Saffire Pro, MAudio DeltaBolt 1212, Motu 828X, RME Fireface, Universal Audio Apollo Twin Solo),

Just to note, the still isn't Windows drivers for any of those other than the MOTU and RME hardware at this time however. Also for all the claims of adaptor/converter compatibility, nobody has actually seen one yet to prove it.

[Ariosto]

NEVER buy anything " all in one." It will mean replacing it ALL in one!

You need a computer you can get at - and replace/update bits when you need to.

All the laptops and variations are rubbish, including all the sanitary pads (sorry, i-pads).

Get a proper desktop computer!

[JohnW63]

I think I am late to this conversation, but I have some experience with all-in-one computers of various brands.

The upside of all of them is a clean look on the desk and less things to plug into other things. They are often quiet, because they know you won't be tucking them under your desk, so they can't have fans spinning all the time. If you are not the type to need to constantly upgrade your computer, AND the all-in-one specs fit your needs, and your software all works well with it, they are a viable choice.

The down side is just about ALL of the guts are proprietary. Power supplies, screens, audio and video boards, if they are not already build into the main board. All parts only fit THAT model of THAT brand computer. The other obvious downside is that if ONE of these components fail, you have to be without any computer for the duration of the repair. I would guess the cost of the repair would be higher, due to extra labor time.

You can upgrade the hard drive or RAM, if you can get inside, as these are industry standard parts. As far as I have seen, only Apple uses very sticky tape to hold the screens on, and you need to get said tape from Apple, which they don't provide to anyone but authorized dealers. Although, you may find in at third party places by now, just like for iPads, iPods, and iPhones.

As a computer repair person for the last almost 30 years, I appreciate the all-in-one computers , but for myself, I still prefer the modular designs of the standard PC. If a component fails, I can easily swap out ONLY that part. Or, if I want to get the newest video card or audio card, I can do that in 10 minutes.

I know a few very small form factor computer ideas have been floated in this thread, but these introduce a lot of the same downsides as an all-in-on. Very proprietary parts and little to no chance to upgrade. You can however get another monitor, should yours fail, with one of these.

[tea for two]

TFT - You mentioned Optane, although the links are pointing at current generation Brix systems. Optane requires I/O controller level support and that isn't being implemented until Kabylake arrives later in the year as far as I'm aware, or have you spotted something in the specs that I've missed?

Pete

http://www.forbes.com/sites/antonyleather/2015/08/05/intel-releases-skylake-cpus-with-z170-chipset-and-mainstream-ddr4-support/#5a374bb965a9



Skylake Z170 Chipset has 30 lanes of PCIe 3.0 for M.2 PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD & Thunderbolt3.
Intel XPoint Optane test was on M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 lanes NVMe AFAIK.
Makes sense for Intel to put XPoint Optane on current interface standard instead of requiring a new interface.

::::

Re Gigabyte Brix :
(previous gen already had a single M.2 PCIe 2.0 NVMe taking 80mm length M.2).

Latest Skylake Gigabyte Brix with Z170 chipset  has a single M.2 PCIe 3.0 NVMe port taking max 80mm length M.2
Although the blurb on the Gigabyte Brix doesn't mention whether it is 4lanes of PCIe 3.0,
given Z170 can handle 30 lanes of PCIe 3.0 & the Brix has Thunderbolt3, one would assume it is PCIe 3.0 x4 lanes,
therefore would take max 80mm length Intel XPoint Optane M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 lanes NVMe with proper drivers.

[Pete Kaine]

Skylake Z170 Chipset has 30 lanes of PCIe 3.0 for M.2 PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD & Thunderbolt3.
Intel XPoint Optane test was on M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 lanes NVMe AFAIK.
Makes sense for Intel to put XPoint Optane on current interface standard instead of requiring a new interface.

Doesn't matter, support needs baking in at PCH level, and the current board implementations don't carry support for it, and this is what Kabylakes big selling point is. They could I suppose cobble together a third party bridge with the correct support, but AFAIK nobody has so far attempted to do so, and given Intel would have to release the controller to allow them to do so, I'm skeptical of them doing so at any point prior to Kabylake launching as initially indicated by Intel where they stated that they wouldn't licence the tech at least initially.

Right now they've got a strangle hold on this, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.... or even until after WD/Sandisk make it to market with their own competitor (estimated 2018).

Whilst I expect M.2 style models to appears, going off the specs they are going to be fairly hampered by that connector, as I don't think M.2 is going to be fast enough to get the full throughput. I'm expected 8X PCIe, or dedicated (memory style) slots to crop up when it does arrive to allow the full though-put as this was promised for the server platform, although we'll have to wait and see regarding what corners get cut in the mainstream platform release.

[johnny h]

NEVER buy anything " all in one." It will mean replacing it ALL in one!

You need a computer you can get at - and replace/update bits when you need to.

All the laptops and variations are rubbish, including all the sanitary pads (sorry, i-pads).

Get a proper desktop computer!

Nah, its a waste of time now. CPUs, memory and all that stuff doesn't generally break. Once its time to "upgrade" then all the other components of your system (motherboard, ram, SSDs) are generally old and slow and well past their use by date. DAW usage is fairly trivial for a modern computer unless you are doing some crazy orchestral stuff.

PC towers are ok if you are a gamer who needs like 5 graphics cards. These days even lots of commercial TV and music videos are edited on MacBook Pros.

[Agharta]

TFT - You mentioned Optane, although the links are pointing at current generation Brix systems. Optane requires I/O controller level support and that isn't being implemented until Kabylake arrives later in the year as far as I'm aware, or have you spotted something in the specs that I've missed?

Is that purely for support as a BOOT drive or also for usage as non-bootable media?
If there is zero support for systems prior to Kabylake that will mean Workstation platforms will have a long wait as Broadwell-E isn't quite out yet so Kabylake-E is likely due in 2018.
With Workstations being prime targets that seems a large missed opportunity.

[resistorman]

An all-in-one is just a big laptop that doesn't fold up. Seems powerful enough for what the OP needs.

[tea for two]

support needs baking in at PCH level, and the current board implementations don't carry support for it, and this is what Kabylakes big selling point is. They could I suppose cobble together a third party bridge with the correct support, but AFAIK nobody has so far attempted to do so, and given Intel would have to release the controller to allow them to do so, I'm skeptical of them doing so at any point prior to Kabylake launching as initially indicated by Intel where they stated that they wouldn't licence the tech at least initially.

Right now they've got a strangle hold on this, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.... or even until after WD/Sandisk make it to market with their own competitor (estimated 2018).

Whilst I expect M.2 style models to appears, going off the specs they are going to be fairly hampered by that connector, as I don't think M.2 is going to be fast enough to get the full throughput. I'm expected 8X PCIe, or dedicated (memory style) slots to crop up when it does arrive to allow the full though-put as this was promised for the server platform, although we'll have to wait and see regarding what corners get cut in the mainstream platform release.

*"Durability 1000x grater than NAND"* interests me .... in the field until ten years down the line will tell.
I suspect you are right concerning M.2, 8 or even 16 lanes of PCIe 3.0 or 4.0 on M.3 or M.4
Server side benefits certainly there, though I'm no longer in the industry to care I'm sorry to say.

For musicians 2GB/s write sounds eye watering.

[Pete Kaine]

Server side benefits certainly there, though I'm no longer in the industry to care I'm sorry to say.

That's the bit I still can't get my head around.

Intel Engineering : We developed this this high density, low cost, stupidly scalable solution that is going to be ideal for implementing in server grade solutions like database/mail server platforms where the feature set, makes most sense as the static nature of the data storage means that large data-sets can be built and will be able to survive system downtime without needing to be rebuilt

Intel Marketing : Great stuff. You know what makes sense then? Lets release it to the mainstream and sell it to gamers for the first 12 / 18 months of its life cycle.

Intel Engineering : But... bu... b... Servers!

Intel Marketing : Lolz.

Still, looking forward to transferring my Kontakt collection over to one.

[JohnW63]

Lets release it to the mainstream and sell it to gamers for the first 12 / 18 months of its life cycle.

There is probably a reason for that. Servers get changed out once every 3-4 years at best. Sys Admins do not like swapping them unless there is a big need to do so. Gamers on the other hand, change motherboards and video cards at the drop of a hat. There are also a lot MORE of them than server installs. So, if you want to really see how it works, give it to gamers to give and let them acid test it. After it has proven to work and be stable and drivers are out for all the server platforms, you can market it to IT departments. Being on the cutting edge of server technology, but risking data is not where IT directors like to be. Up-to-date and STABLE is their comfort zone.

[Pete Kaine]

Sure, I get all that with the gaming side... we made our name over here based around our extreme gaming rigs, long before I was given a desk in the building!

In fact I agree on all your points, but it still just seems odd to give it that much of a head start in the mainstream after all the early press examples we saw involved database scenarios!

Whilst some bleeding edge gamers will go for it, unless they get them super cheap at launch, I'm not sure how many will be picking it up over the already cheap SSD's/M.2's, although I guess after Sandforce and the early SSD issues any public stress testing of the controllers is going to be advisable prior to it going into business. In fact the cynic in me thinks this is over cautious and is wondering what concerns they have about the controllers at this point, but then that's possibly just me being sat doing support for far too many years.

They are claiming that we're going to see size parity at launch then they'll scale up quickly over the coming years, in those regards perhaps that's another reason why they've gone this route, as those database servers are about the capacity, as much as the latency & bandwidth.

It just seems to me that the gamers won't see much benefit in load times, the games are too small to really load stress the controller (I say this as a gamer too... I don't make that statement lightly!), and it feels like all the benefits we were promised are being marginalized.

However now I've typed this out, I can't help but realise that a number of features won't really make sense until the capacity is scaled up 10 fold. I suppose that them makes sense to use the gamers as a extended trail period to iron out bugs until then.

If so they are going to have to bring the price right down to make them truly attractive. That I'm alright with at least because if they manage to destroy the pricing on their own, then I'm perfect happy to pick up my Skylake-E rig in 2017 and benefit from the economics of scale brought on by those 2016 gaming rigs.

But this is Intel. And they have the market sewn up until WD/Sandisk come to market with the competitor in 2018 (at the earliest). That's two years of Intel refusing to share it's toys with the rest of the class, and to me that means it could end up as another RDRAM situation in a few years, which honestly wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.

All in all, I'm probably just a bit salty regarding the lack of enthusisat range upgrades this year... again. I've been running my rig as it is for about 4 years now and the hasn't been a worthwhile upgrade since then; I think I just want some new toys to play with!

[Mike Stranks]

An all-in-one is just a big laptop that doesn't fold up. Seems powerful enough for what the OP needs.

Thanks for the comment, but as I mentioned somewhere earlier in the thread I'm now suited with one of Mr Scan's finest ('desktops')