Originally posted by: agogley
The Aspire dimensions in inches are 13.8"Dx11.2"Wx9"H.
The Shuttle SN95P is listed in mm but I did the conversion to inches: 12.6"Lx8.3"Wx8.6"H
I too am having trouble deciding. Foxconn offers a pentium D solution with a PCI 16 slot (945Gexpress) but Shuttles new offering the SD31P does not offer an graphics expansion slot. Although I don't need any heavy duty graphics capabilities today I certainly would like to be able to upgrade in the future should I so desire. I am just not convinced that onboard graphics is the way to go even for as little as I use my computer for. Shuttle is scheduled to release a 955X unit sometime but I don't know when that will be (I suspect Q4).
A laptop is also very tempting. The new Dells XPS looks awfully damn good...if not expensive.
I dont mean to sound like a fanboy but if you're gonna go the dual core route, you might be better of going with the AMD offerings. If they are too expensive when compared to the Pentium D then wait for a few months and AMD will introduce some cheaper Athlon X2. But yea, its always important to have the choice to upgrade from your current hardware, specially when it comes to something like a video card. Right now with the integrated ati graphics, you might be able to run doom3 and battlefield 2 on low res, but what about games that come out 6-10 months down the road. You'll be lucky if you can get 20 FPS on those games with that graphic card.
HOWEVER, having said that, take a look at this link:
http://indigo.intel.com/mbsg/details.aspx?compID=2524
From what the information say under Slot/Connector, they mention the presence of a 16x PCI-e slot which is used for a video card. PCI-e is the sucessor of AGP. I'm sorry if I'm just repeating information you already know, but I know some people get confused with pci and pci-e. And the fact that you thought SD31P didn't have anything for graphic expansion, made me think you either were misinformed or just didn't know about PCI-e.
Dell XPS does look pretty good, but since its their flagship laptop for gamers, it carries a premium. You might be better of going with the 9300 laptop. It offers the same video card options last I checked (6800 from nvidia) and a pentium-m proc.
Welcome to the forums btw!
If you have any questions about anymore of this stuff, feel free to post away or even PM me, Id be more than happy to help you out with whatever I can.