With office space at a premium, the need for small, compact PCs becomes even more pressing. But the trick is to fulfil this aim without sacrificing anything in connectivity. With bulky monitors being replaced by flat panel screens as the price of these continues to fall, the main occupier of space becomes the system box.

The two ways most vendors approach the reduction in size of the PC is to either to put it in a smaller box, with smaller processors to aid the reduction of heat build-up, or replace the box completely and go down the all-in-one route.

With motherboard manufacturers now beginning to add the Pentium 4 to micro-ATX boards, or even Flex-ATX boards, there's suddenly a lot of potential for the small form factor format. Add to that the Intel 845 chipset with its cheap SDRAM support for the P4, or the 845D offering much better performance because of its DDR support, and the compact PC design is set to be revolutionised from the quaint slow systems of a year ago to systems that are usable for even some of the more advanced of today's office applications.

Similarly, the all-in-one design has grown from the mis-match of notebook and desktop components and poor performance of one or two years ago to systems that match the standard desktop for speed and usability.

So here's a selection of both types of compact PC, all bar one using an Intel processor solution and two using the new Northwood P4.

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