This system securely mounts a Mac mini inside a specially designed 1U enclosure, which also contains one PCIe 2.0 x4 slot, a 75W power supply plus a Thunderbolt daisy-chain port.

ENGADGET: Sonnet announces RackMac mini Xserver, makes Apple desktop IT life seem more legit

Reviewers agreed that its inclusion helped significantly improve single-threaded performance, to the point where the faster (in default clock speed) 3.4GHz Phenom II X4 965 was falling behind in benchmarks.

ENGADGET: AMD's 3.2GHz hexacore Phenom II X6 1090T comes out for a review roundup

The RackMac mini Xserver supports one half-length, x16 (x4 mode), PCIe 2.0 card to enable the use of professional video capture cards, 8Gb Fibre Channel cards, 10-Gigabit Ethernet cards, and RAID controller cards with a racked Mac mini all in 1U rack space.

ENGADGET: Sonnet announces RackMac mini Xserver, makes Apple desktop IT life seem more legit

New on that front is the company's just-announced ASM5800 (pictured above) and ASM3202 models, the former of which packs your choice of Intel Core 2 Quad or AMD Phenom II X4 processors, 4GB to 8GB of RAM, 750GB or 1TB hard drives, and ATI Radeon HD 4650 or NVIDIA GeForce GT 230 graphics, while the later is an AMD-only affair with a Phenom II X4 925 processor, ATI Radeon HD3200 graphics, 2GB to 8GB of RAM, and a 640GB or 750GB hard drive.

ENGADGET: Acer rolls out ASM5800, ASM3202, ASX5810 desktop PCs