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Introduction

Almost every motherboard manufacturer has jumped upon the SFF market after watching Shuttle's lead and for good reason; it breaks the traditional computer mold of being a plain beige box and gives a computer a bit of a flair stirring up a lot of consumer interest. The novelty of the SFF design also allows for higher margins with a board and case combo running in at close to the 300$ mark as opposed to some of the same motherboards coming in at under 100$. We recently took a sampling of four different SFF systems from various manufacturers that were based upon Intel's 865G chipset. Today we look at something in the same vein but a little different. It is not strictly a SFF system that we look at but something that expands upon the same idea in Antec's Aria.

Antec is no stranger to the computing world with the renowned quality of their power supplies as well as popular cases including the LanBoy series. The last few personal systems that I built were all housed in Antec cases and I have been quite happy with the build quality and design. The Aria is not the standard run of the mill case as we have implied. Instead of the traditional tower, the Aria is a cube shaped case that can only house a mATX board. It is easily the larger than the largest SFF system that we have run across, yet it is only the fraction of the size of a regular midsize tower. The Aria also brings a few other tricks to the table as seen below:

Specifications