Pogo Linux: 1GHz for under $1000

Case, cooling and the rest of the story

The Altura's mid-tower features 4 x 5.25" bays and a total of 4 x 3.5" drive bays. Of the 4 x 3.5" bays, one is exposed and one is behind a floppy cutout on the front bezel. We aren't the biggest fans of these floppy cutouts on the front of cases simply because we believe in function over form but considering the number of 3.5" bays we can overlook this feature.

One thing that we really liked about the case is that the side panels are individually removable and are held in place by two thumbscrews each. So to get into the case you don't even need a screwdriver, which can definitely come in handy when you're just checking to make sure that everything is securely installed inside.

There is a swinging door that shades the four 5.25" drive bays, again this doesn't really provide too much functional use, but it does contribute to the aesthetic quality of the case.

The case is fairly well made and although there are a few sharp edges on the inside, for the most part it can be considered average construction for a chassis. Pogo outfitted the case with two extra fans in addition to the fan on the 300W generic power supply.

The fan at the lower front of the case, as you would expect, is an intake fan and the fan at the rear is set to exhaust air. Unfortunately, these two fans combined with the GlobalWin FOP38 CPU fan and the HDD drive bay fan make for a very noisy case. This was our biggest complaint about the system and although the case does muffle a considerable amount of noise, we would've liked to have a slightly quieter running system.

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The FOP38 features a thermal pad that separates it from the 1GHz Athlon CPU. The FOP38 was ranked fairly high in our most recent Socket-A Cooler roundup (2nd place) and as we mentioned in the roundup, its biggest downside is its noise. Another somewhat minor complaint we had to voice was that removing the fan isn't as simple as using a flat head screwdriver to unlatch the clamp; rather you have to use a flat head combined with a set of pliers or another tool to actually unlatch the clamp while applying pressure to it.

To finish things off Pogo includes a 10/100 Ethernet card and of course the entire package comes pre-configured for use with RedHat Linux 7.0. Our system did come pre-configured with RedHat 7.0 and a dual boot copy of Windows 2000; however, the base Altura system offers the Windows 2000 option at a $150 premium.

Of course this review wouldn't be complete without an assessment of the Linux install and configuration of the Altura machine. For that we go to Jeff Brubaker, our resident Linux guru who spent a great deal of time with the system under Linux.