I've been looking at building a replacement PC for the GF as a Christmas present. I was looking at the standard ATX mobos in a nice moded Lian-Li case, but someone turned me on to the newer SFF boxes.

Previously, there was a lot of limitation. the boards had few (if any) expansion slots, and you were pretty much forced to use whichever integrated hardware they put in the box.

The latest generation of equipment seems a lot better, providing "barebones" set-ups with AGP/PCI slots and room for multiple 3.5/5.25 optical/disk drives.

Does anyone have any experience with these boxes? Her primary use is photo/dv editing, but she's also a gamer on the side. I've pretty much narrowed my hunt down to a couple choices.

The Shuttle SB62G2 is a nice unit, and as a manufacturer has pretty much set the standard for SFF equipment. but it's Intel only, and well... I'm not much of an Intel fan. and ummm.. the shuttles come in pretty colors. Remember this is for a gf who like cheesy **** like that... heh

the Biostar iDEQ 200N is a nice box, with AMD support

Ideally, I'd love to get my hands on Abit's new SFF box called DigiDice, but I haven't heard anything about a release date. If anyone can shed light on this bad-boy I'd be grateful. That thing "looks" incredible, with lots of features not yet available on the other systems. But of course, I can't find any information on the release date.

My biggest concern with all of these is going to be compatiility with heat control and noise a close second.

Any input on your experiences with these SFF oxes is appreciated, thanks!