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I have a Shuttle XPC SN85G4V2 with an Athlon64 processor and a nice fast SATA drive. The designers dropped the floppy drive for memory card readers, which so far has worked just fine for me. Its small (comes with a handy carrying bag!), very quiet and powerful. Runs 64-bit Suse 9.1 perfectly and I can switch over and play Doom3 in high res.

The only complaint I have is that the internal (USB) wifi card is not working under linux. A good PCI adapter remedied that but took up the only PCI slot.

About a year ago (sic!), I considered the Hush as a possible use for my home server (music box, mail, web and file server) so that I can leave it on all the time in my living room. It is unfortunately quite expensive and so I now own a Shuttle http://us.shuttle.com/ ST62K Zen and must say that it is a nice alternative: less expensive and with no internal power supply fan! I now happily run a PIV 2.8GHz with two Seagate 80GB hard drive in it without any overheating problem and virtually no noise.

The Zen case from Shuttle has an external power supply and is very quiet.

Get yourself a Shuttle XPC with one of these and you can put your Athlon in your backpack. :) I use my XPC with my iBook as the X display for those times when I need more number-crunching power than just my laptop can provide.

Nope. Product Specs. No TV Out on board, but if you get a video card to fill the PCI Express slot, you can probably pick up a PCI Express video card in the near future that has TV-Out on it.

According to This Page an Athlon 64 XPC of similar appearance is either available or pending - the Shuttle site appears to be under heavy load and is glitching badly so I can't give any further detail.

It's good to see that users who jib at Intel's excessive prices are looked after by Shuttle.

No neon, no overclocking, no extra slots you don't need. Just little machines the work.

I would love to jam a monster like this into my shuttle. It's the fastest coolest little machine I've ever owned. Some problems dual booting into debian on it, but I think I've got those mostly ironed out at this point.

So, is it a matter of it not working AT ALL unless there's two PCI-x slots? And for that matter unless there are TWO of them? Of course that would leave the SFF crowd out.

But seeing as AGP is merely a modified PCI slot, I wonder if we'll see an AGP version of this card. And for that matter if this new card sort of works like the old (mindblowing at the time) voodoo2 cards where if you had one, it was great and if you had TWO it was brain-shattering. Or is it an absolute MUST that there be two?

And lastly, what about heat on these suckers? Doesn't look too good for an SFF machine, but I would love it if it did work. The portability to gaming sessions alone is of immeasurable value to my SFF enthusiasm. I would however, depending on how much expendible income I could free up build another big-box around this system. Not just for gaming, but I think these cards would give the old Oxygen cards a run for their money for Maya. And oh yeah, not that I'm holding my breath on this one, (I'm sure this has been asked elsewhere) but what about linux drivers?

P.S. Its not just a gaming box, i do all my work on it too, just in case someone thinks i'd spend $1500 to play games.

...I don't think picoBTX is intended for SFF machines, according to an earlier Anandtech article picoBTX is still 8" x 10.5", awfully big for an SFF machine.

Note that the Shuttle XPC requires a proprietary heat-pipe cooling system and a special small, quiet power supply to keep the system cool and quiet. On the other hand, improved cooling and noise reduction are built into the BTX spec. Theoretically, any computer maker will be able to easily build a tiny, cool, and quiet SFF picoBTX machine based on Intel's 6.9-liter reference system.

Perhaps they're putting the chip in a mini PC system that doesn't support a conventional fan?

I've assembled many Shuttle-based systems like that (for myself and clients), and each of them have a pretty nifty heatpipe and ventilation fan -- but no room whatsoever to install the massive fan that ships with Intel chips these days.

So, I've got a stack of 'em in the closet. Up to about 25 at last count, give or take.

I've personally had Intel warranty replace a defective 2.4 P4 -- it took several hours on hold and I had to speak with Intel directly, and not my distributor -- but they replaced it knowing it was in this type of system and their fan wasn't in use.

Perhaps they're putting the chip in a mini PC system that doesn't support a conventional fan?

I've assembled many Shuttle-based systems like that (for myself and clients), and each of them have a pretty nifty heatpipe and ventilation fan -- but no room whatsoever to install the massive fan that ships with Intel chips these days.

So, I've got a stack of 'em in the closet. Up to about 25 at last count, give or take.

I've personally had Intel warranty replace a defective 2.4 P4 -- it took several hours on hold and I had to speak with Intel directly, and not my distributor -- but they replaced it knowing it was in this type of system and their fan wasn't in use.

I tried for a couple hours to get it working, with a custom-built Wolk kernel, RedHat 9, and a Shuttle SN41G2 XPC. While I was finally able to get ACPI working like it should, I never did manage to get suspend to ram working.

I do like what was said below about using the state change to cool, pumping the gaseous Sapphire away and re-condensing it

Check this out. It doesn't use Sapphire, but it does use the state change to cool the material and then bring it back to the processor.

IMHO, it works very well in my PC.

A friend of mine has some form of Shuttle case he uses for his MythTV setup, and, naturally, it came with a piercing, blindingly bright, blue LED to let everyone within half a mile know whether it's on or not. Occasionally, I end up sleeping on the futon ten feet away from it if I'm over there late at night and not heading home until the next day, and I honestly can't sleep in the same room unless I cover the light up with something.

I'm the kind of person whose eyes are sensitive enough to light that I use a single 40W bulb to light my room at home and read by, and in the past, I've used only a 25W bulb at times. This trend for bright, flashy indicator lights on everything these days (including the pulsating white one on my iBook to let me know it's asleep...I have to stick it underneath the bed or put a book in front of it to sleep while it's sleeping) is literally kind of painful sometimes.

As an added bonus, I have Keratoconus, a fairly uncommon cornea problem, so all these excessively bright little lights on everything are wonderfully smeared all over the place in my vision, which makes them even more annoying and drives me absolutely nuts.

I love little blinking lights all over the place on my hardware as much as the next guy, but lately, they've been getting pretty ridiculously obtrusive. There are only so many little lights that are actually necessary, and they don't need to be all that bright to be noticeable or useful.

Aside from the "kewl" factor, rack mount systems for the job described will be very expensive, underpowered, incredibly noisy, and of limited expandability. This is mostly because if you're talking about saving space you pretty much have to be talking about 1U systems, which sacrifice a lot for their form factor (thinness).

What's a better plan?

I'd recommend Shuttle mini-PCs or similar (a few makes are available now). Hugely cheaper then rackmount, much quieter, better expansion (two or three internal hard drives if you don't use floopy or CDROM), and honestly SMALLER then 1U systems. Remember as thin as 1U systems are they are 19" wide (before you add the rack which adds a few more) and are typically very deap (20+ inches often). They are also much heavier then Shuttle systems. Furthermore, so long as you stay away from the mini-ITX based brands (Via, yuck!) they have every wiz-bang feature you could ask from a full size PC (duel channel DDR400, hyperthreading, USB 2.0, Gigabit lan, firewire, etc, etc) built in (see the Shuttle X in particular).

You'll have a much easier time moving three of these small boxes around (get a small carry-on suitcase) then a 4U rack case, and your ears will thank you.

I agree that having your own rack would be cool, and I would build one if I had the money, but I can't help but wonder what the benefit is over some mini-ATX boxes aside from the bragging rights. Shuttle's XPC line might do the trick and actually take up less space...

As far as expensive gadgets go, the Shuttle SB75G2 has a blue power LED that lights up my ENTIRE LIVING ROOM when pitch black. The room is lit with a ghastly blue hue just enough to where you can navigate after shutting out all the rest of the light.

This guy is right on target with this new "blue" craze because it's starting to take the coolness out of all the things I've custom modded with blue LEDs :(

Oh, I forgot: each of these boxes contains a 2,8GHz P4 Northwood CPU (200/800MHz FSB), 1GB RAM. The Shuttle barebone used is the S75G2 and one of the reasons we chose it was that it has an on-board gigabit ethernet adapter. The CPU cooler that came with it is also very interesting - it uses a rather unique design with a heatpipe ...

My favorite use for those mini-itx boards is making a nice shuttle xpc. Cheap, fast gaming computers that are quite portable as well.

The only problem I've found so far is they ony come with nvidia onboard graphics, but that's what the agp slot is for.

The client, though, is a tougher nut to crack. If you only want to stream MP3s, then a product like the Audiotron would be excellent; you don't have to worry about finding a good Linux-compatible character-LCD based control system (which you probably would want to use, in this case), and then programming it. The Audiotron-type products are probably best in an audio-only environment, although you could probably get by with a second PC, especially if you can stand to have a small keyboard, mouse and monitor in your rec room. Wireless might be a problem, but I'd imagine anything that doesn't natively grok 802.11x would work with an AP on the other end of a short network cable.

I would advise you to take your thinking beyond just MP3s, though. If you were to get a Shuttle or similar small form factor PC and put a TV card, Linux and MythTV on it, you would have an excellent PVR system that would also play MP3s and even act as a frontend to emulators like MAME and ZSNES. Even if you don't want a PVR (already have Tivo, don't watch TV, whatever), you can still use the other functions. Also, most of the small form factor PCs I've seen are designed to be small, quiet and non-intrusive - it probably wouldn't be much worse than a system like the Audiotron, from an annoyance standpoint. If I were in your shoes, I'd seriously consider taking the money I was going to spend on an Audiotron or similar product and putting it towards one of these babies.

And support PC manufacturers that do not bundle MS Windows by default ( Shuttle comes to mind here, but there are many others).

Lately I've pretty much felt the same way, but not just with games. Every year we've pretty much been seeing the same things coming out of both Hollywood, the music industry and the games industry.

I have a slightly older friend who has always gone to see the latest subtitled film, listened to Belgian house, and was into retro gaming before the concept had even been invented. I always used to take the P*** out of him!

The past year I've been buying a lot of oriental films in a big way, in particular I'm getting heavily into Korean cinema and when I haven't been trying to get Mame games working on a shuttle mini pc that's sat under my tv, I've been really into the indie games scene. Gametunnel and games from moonpod, pompom and sigma team have kept my gaming urges alive this year. They might not offer anything new, but at least they are games offering gameplay, rather than chasing the need of the masses to immerse themselves in a movie. I suppose once you've seen so much media of any time, you begine to crave somehting new.

It's not old age, just boredom. Thankfully, I haven't felt the need to get into Belgian trance music yet...

I strongly recommend Shuttles. For a fraction of the price of the Dell you can buy a barebones Shuttle matched to your requirements, stick in a drive, some memory, a chip and the graphics card to meet your 3D needs and you're laughing. They're light and compact (ergo portable) and really beautifully made.

FWIW, I used to be an editor at PC Magazine (in the UK) and if I was still a hack I'd be raving about these boxes on a monthly basis. =)

P.S. No I don't have stock nor any other interest to declare - but these things are now performing wonders for me everywhere from our server farm to high end gaming PC's (well, games-testing PC's). I am simply a happy bunny. =D

For example:

• SuSE 9.0 Pro for amd64.
• SuSE Enterprise Server 8 for amd64.
• Mandrake 9.2rc1 for amd64.
• Fedora Core1 test1 for amd64.
• Gentoo's amd64 info
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS & WS are available for amd64.

I've been using Gentoo's amd64 stuff for a little while on my new Shuttle Box. Things are generally good although there are still a lot of packages that are masked. KDE is also problematic which may be a turn-off for some people.

A colleague just got a new dual-opteron Workstation from Pogo and is running SuSE 9.0 pro for amd64 and is rather happy -- just about everything plays nicely.

Multimedia has significant problems on both systems. No flash player for 64-bit, mplayer and related multimedia requiring 32-bit codecs. Nvidia amd 64 drivers require some patching if they work at all, at least as of last wednesday.

Otherwise quite happy with all of these. Mandrake claims to have multimedia stuff working properly (see above link for info) but wants to eat my partition table so I haven't checked it out yet.

--
"Now you'll see why they call me the Velour Fog" --Zapp Brannigan, 25-star General & Cpt.

They already do make machines with heat pipes, such as this Shuttle XPC. Most of their machines use them, actually.

model called the SS51G
SS51?!? Man that was out like 3 years ago. Move into 2004 and check out some newer models:
SN85G4
SB75G2
ST61G4

model called the SS51G
SS51?!? Man that was out like 3 years ago. Move into 2004 and check out some newer models:
SN85G4
SB75G2
ST61G4

model called the SS51G
SS51?!? Man that was out like 3 years ago. Move into 2004 and check out some newer models:
SN85G4
SB75G2
ST61G4

Then try one of the other shuttle systems.

And if you're into Athlon processors, there's the SN41G2 (among others) with an 8X AGP slot that is just begging to have a Raedon 9800 Pro thrown into it. The SS51G isn't the only intel system with an AGP slot either. showing here

And if you're into Athlon processors, there's the SN41G2 (among others) with an 8X AGP slot that is just begging to have a Raedon 9800 Pro thrown into it. The SS51G isn't the only intel system with an AGP slot either. showing here

Don't forget you need to buy the processor, RAM, and harddrive(s) (plus mouse, keyboard, etc), which add to the toal cost. Shuttle does offer some bundled stuff. I recently bought a Shuttle SB61G2R that I've been very pleased with, and it came with a DVD-ROM, memory card reader, wireless built-in, and even a shoulder bag to tote it around. It runs pretty quiet, although not silent, and I get a lot of compliments about the look of it.

Although my system has the same footprint as a (mini-)tower, the low height does make a difference in appearance, especially on a small desktop workspace. I still have a lot of cables in the back, but I don't think I can avoid that with a different case, either.

The artwork at the top of shuttle's page for this thing is bad. There's a woman sitting, zen-like (whoaaa, ad dude, very creative man!), next to a picture of the case. Problem is, when your brain uses the human figure as a scale reference to compute the size of the case, it ends up looking gargantuan. I think they're trying to sell "small".

"But if we scale it correctly, you won't be able to make out any detail!"

Yes. So put another larger photo somewhere else on the page.

Rear-mounted digital S/PDIF input and output ports (Tos-Link)

On the 2 shuttles I have (SS51G, SN41G2)the digital output ports have been front-mounted. Having it in the back is nice because you're not running the cord behind the computer.

One of the downsides of this seems to be that there's no AGP port. This is where the size savings comes in for ths aprticukar model. Both of my shuttles have on-baord graphics, but also have an AGP slot that I could get better performance from.

*grr* No removable drive cage either. Both of my shuttles have a removable drive cage. It made setting the machines up so much easier.

The external power supply for this unit will also make setup easier.

All told, I do my shuttles. They're nice systems, and so much quieter than the systems they replaced. Even nicer was full support forom linux. I dropped my old drives into the new system, and they were good to go.

Rear-mounted digital S/PDIF input and output ports (Tos-Link)

On the 2 shuttles I have (SS51G, SN41G2)the digital output ports have been front-mounted. Having it in the back is nice because you're not running the cord behind the computer.

One of the downsides of this seems to be that there's no AGP port. This is where the size savings comes in for ths aprticukar model. Both of my shuttles have on-baord graphics, but also have an AGP slot that I could get better performance from.

*grr* No removable drive cage either. Both of my shuttles have a removable drive cage. It made setting the machines up so much easier.

The external power supply for this unit will also make setup easier.

All told, I do my shuttles. They're nice systems, and so much quieter than the systems they replaced. Even nicer was full support forom linux. I dropped my old drives into the new system, and they were good to go.

Shuttle already has an Athlon 64 Cube, which is cheaper, more rugged, and has a heatpipe...

If you're looking for a much lower-end solution (e.g. you're running a web server on your DSL line), makes some low-cost little boards, one of which can support laptop hard drives. No graphics, supports a variety of Linux and *BSD operating systems.

Or you can get a used laptop from eBay or a local used-computer dealer. Power use is low, size is small, operating system support is easy to figure out, and they theoretically have built-in UPSs, though used laptop batteries are often pretty dead. Prop them up for good airflow to avoid heat problems.

When the ambient temperature drops, the CPU temp drops, the noise drops. So maybe I should put the box in my fridge ;)

Yes, Shuttle makes one.

Insightful? How so?

I so happen to have one of "those god awful 'mini' 'cube' PCs" and it's fantastic, thank you very much. I used to be a vocal opponent of those things because they were kludgy and underperformant, but I got myself one of them "mailboxes" some time ago and it's been great. I had the mother of all great big cases, the Antec 1080, which I loved (and still do, for its purpose it's the best case out there), but I realised that for normal PC operation, something that weighs 35 kilos and has eight fans is overkill.

When it was time to upgrade, I was simply going to get the same only smaller, but a friend sold me into getting one of "those god awful 'mini' 'cube' PCs" and I must say, it's one of the best computing choices I've made.

With a combo drive it can do everything a regular PC can, without significantly more noise/heat, while being smaller, lighter, and looking damn cool in black. I already upgraded the system twice with no worries, and as the time draws near to update the system again, I'm thinking about going 64-bit, but whatever I do you can bet it's going to come in a tiny black box.

Insightful? How so?

I so happen to have one of "those god awful 'mini' 'cube' PCs" and it's fantastic, thank you very much. I used to be a vocal opponent of those things because they were kludgy and underperformant, but I got myself one of them "mailboxes" some time ago and it's been great. I had the mother of all great big cases, the Antec 1080, which I loved (and still do, for its purpose it's the best case out there), but I realised that for normal PC operation, something that weighs 35 kilos and has eight fans is overkill.

When it was time to upgrade, I was simply going to get the same only smaller, but a friend sold me into getting one of "those god awful 'mini' 'cube' PCs" and I must say, it's one of the best computing choices I've made.

With a combo drive it can do everything a regular PC can, without significantly more noise/heat, while being smaller, lighter, and looking damn cool in black. I already upgraded the system twice with no worries, and as the time draws near to update the system again, I'm thinking about going 64-bit, but whatever I do you can bet it's going to come in a tiny black box.

What's wrong with small form factor systems? The product under review is in the same category. For me, the mini system fits my needs because I only forsee utilizing an AGP slot and PCI slot, if at all, since the motherboard has graphics and sound built in and multiple firewire/USB 2 ports. Plus, I can put it into a carry-on bag should I need to take it somewhere (that has a monitor!), and I can upgrade the system with non-laptop parts.

Ok, have I defended my purchase now? :)

1. Build yourself a XPC or something that size.
2. Toss in the needed parts including a 200G HD and a PCI 802.11b card.
3. Post notices around the dorm/building/whatever with the SSID and quick instuctions.
4. Enjoy.

While the selection of files in the beginning will be low I'm sure it would take little time for it to become quite varied.

The other solution is to buy a cheap 802.11b router, hook up to the LAN and bury it behind some sheetrock. The campus IT dept could spend years looking for it (if done correctly).

Of course this information is for educational purposes only yada yada yada ...

Alright, so that's a bit tongue in cheek but there is a point here - mainstream computing doesn't have to be ugly. I'm the owner of a Powerbook 12" and it's pretty sleek. On the PC side, I run a Shuttle small form factor, so that too looks pretty nice. Even the co-lo server I run looks nice, as it is a Raq4.

It is possible to get decent looking kit and leave the beige boxes behind, without having to go to the lengths presented on that site. It's just a question of whether it matters enough to you. For me, it does.

Cheers,
Ian

This has less to do with processor speed and computing capabilities than it does with size and noise. There are a great many people buying smaller cases like the shuttle xpc because computers do everything they want and footprint, noise, and style are the things lacking now.

Gamers won't care much about BTX unless there is a killer video card that will only be released in PCI Express form factor. At least initially.

It's called a Shuttle and I have one. Or at least will, when I have the money, but several of my friends have them already, and they're just flawless. Silent, pretty efficient cooling, etc. etc.

Of course you have to give up the extra hard drive bay and do with a combo drive to replace your DVD & CDRW but it's still a neat package. The (optional and expensive) bag looks cool enough. That in one hand and a 17" Prophet LCD bag in the other and you'll be the King of any LAN parties.

Pluggable liquid-cooled rack-mounted modules are not the way to go. Ask anyone who had a liquid-cooled IBM mainframe. It used to be said of the IBM 370/168 that it needed "six plumbers and a CE (customer engineer)."

Guess this thing won't fit into my Shuttle PC...

The shuttle? What shuttle? this shuttle? Why not spend the whole ten seconds to write a decent summary?