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Review of the New Shuttle XPC Chassis
DigiKid writes "Mini PCs are all the rage these days it seems, especially for the LAN Gamers
in our midst. Shuttle
Computer has been releasing new additions to their line of XPCs, that have
the latest features, like USB 2.0, Firewire, and even support for Intel's
Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading.
This review takes you on a tour of the newest XPC from Shuttle, based on the
i845GE chipset. The benchmarks don't lie and this tiny little cube PC
holds its own versus a full sized rig." Last week I put together a 51g from them and was very impressed at how well it works and how quiet it is.
No replies yet and the server is allready inaccessable. SlashCache! I'll gladly pay for this service.
Should check out the MiniITX boards from VIA. MiniITX. Smaller than this, and quite efficient. Not really a gamers system though.
Does XPC stand for something or was it chosen just to sound cool?
OLPC Australia
I was a little confused by their "heat tube".. It didn't look very well designed. Is their anyway to mod the cooling on these guys for better performance? Has anyone benchmarked how they performed when refegirated? We ceartainly firdge most of the comuters at our lan parties.... Nalanthi
I can't find my
the latest features, like USB 2.0, Firewire..
Yeah, Firewire! It's the latest feature from 1999!
slashdot!=valid HTML
this from the person sitting behind their computer on a friday night?
i'm home ill.... i have an.. err.... excuse?
Wannabe!
... and the ACHME power supply is a nice touch!
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
i prefer the Samba and Sabre from FIC. I have a Sabre in the car and a Samba acting as a tivo-like device in the house.
with the integrated pc-card slot, the only cable of significant length is for power. in the car, the pc slot is quite handy for sync'ing tunes to the car. something the shuttle doesn't have.
Here is another good review of the shuttle-sb51g. I have yet to see a bad review of this. I have a friend who just got his hands on one and the word it is screams like a banshee (But much quieter)
I like these small computers, but I would rather see a PC made the same size/look as a standard piece of audio equipment (cd player or receiver size) so that I could put it in with my audio equipment and not have it seem out of place.
These cubes are small, but they're a weird akward shape.
Coming SOON: AGP65536X!
The ATX and Mini ATXhave been out well before those cubes G4 Cubes.
Does anyone have a link to one of the hardware sites which visited Shuttle? (I can't remember if it was TomsHardware or Anandtech, but I've looked on both), they we're shown the new range of cases that are going to be released... especially the multicoloured ones.
I was hunting for this link the other day, trying to convince my brother to get one of the newer cases (whenever they surface of course).
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
But...does it run MacOS X? Oh, wait, never mind.
---
Open Source Shirts
...current setup with these. I've got a few boxen under the desk now, some old, well..all old, but as far as realestate goes, I could put 3-4 of these on a shelf under a small table and actually save some space. Slapp a diff OS on each of them and have a nice small network of boxen to experiment with.
-- AcquaCow
up 12 days, 22:30, 2 users, load averages: 993.20, 994.21, 994.56
*makes note to limit user processes...
Checking out the specs, it seems a box in this case would have little over a laptop, other than 1 (count them, "one") pci slot. Which isn't so cool considering it has NO pcmcia slots, and laptops ususally have 2. Oh, and no screen or battery power. OK, we've established it isn't much of a laptop, so what does it have over a 2+ Ghz laptop with Geforce 4 graphics?
My friend, who always wants to borrow money from me, just got this yesterday. He says it's the ONLY computer he was able to put together without ANY problems on the first try. All the drivers loaded without problems (Win XP), and it was up and running in less than an hour. He had/has the Cappuccino, too, and it was a nightmare. The sound was flakey and the drivers were crap.
He notes two things: One, it's REALLY QUIET, and two, the on-board video is pretty bad. But he loves it. He's using it for recording live music, to carry around with him, not play games on.
I can't help but feel like the end of the "build-it-yourself computer" era is near. Things are getting smaller and smaller. Parts are getting cheaper and cheaper (except RAM..). When I had a job last year repairing PCs, people would bring in E-machines with their cheap, hard to replace power supplies, and Gateways that didn't even have a serial or PS/2 port, and only supported "half height" PCI cards. While there will always be people that want a huge tower and everything "custom built", what happens when the typical desktop PC is a small black box that's warranty voids as soon as you (after finding the "secret screwdriver") open it?
Eh, I feel old, and I'm only 25.
And yeah, I think I'll be getting a Shuttle as my next case. LOOKS AWESOME!@!$
What I don't under stand is they say the MB is flexATX but the ports are not standard flexATX.
Isn't port location and Chassis compatibility part of the ATX standard????
I run a dual pIII 700 system with a gf3 ti200 ...no, I can't make the framejump with this setup)
their test system is over twice as fast and has a much newer graphics card. My guess is that they didn't change the "com_maxfps" variable from the default of 85 to something a tad higher. I tend to average around 150 fps in q3 at 1024 in 32bit with most everything turned on. In hallways I peak over 300 (i set com_maxfps to 350 =)
-- AcquaCow
up 12 days, 22:30, 2 users, load averages: 993.20, 994.21, 994.56
*makes note to limit user processes...
Yes, and I'm sure your monitor is running at 100hz. This is a P4 3ghz system, and they fit a GF4 TI 4400 in there...
If I look at I have in my own pc, it seems that all my cards could be replaced with the onboard chipsets, except for adding a proper graphics card. :)
But how good is the sound chip Realtek ALC 650. How does it compare to fx a Soundblaster Live. I don't need a lot of fancy features, the digital output is fine since I can connect it to my external sub. and speakers.
Is it lacking any features that could degrade the performance in games like "Hardware Sound Acceleration". I have seen a few reviews of the shuttle PCs, but none of them really mentions if the Realtek chip is a good replacement.
Maybe it doesn't matter.
my sig
My G4 Cube does :)
I'd be very wary of sound on this. I bought 2 of the early model SV25's (Shuttle also) and they are SO loud. The powersupply fan is part of the problem..it's ourageously loud. People really don't like using it because of the sound alone.
I would definitely check out the sound factor on this one before buying.
"Does XPC stand for something or was it chosen just to sound cool?"
eXploding Power Capacitors.
Those heat pipes may look cool, but they're just that. Fancy looking, and wouldn't cool a 486 properly
why they put the SPDIF Out on the front and the In on the back.
I have been waiting for the AMD version with AGP slot and it is finaly here but my big question is does it run Linux? While I am confident that it can run a basic Linux setup it is pretty much useless to me if there are no drivers for the sound or ethernet chipsets. With only 1 PCI slot choosing between sound and ethernet just won't cut it. SO has anyone gotten Linux running on one of these XPC's? How well did it run and were drivers a hassle?
Can you install Linux on the system and are there Linux drivers for all of its devices? What is the Linux performance?
Just bloody typical
It's a goatse link!
You may not agree with what I'm saying but I'll kill you for my right to say it
It's not the fact it's based on the Athlon that's the lure, though I imagine that's the case for some. It's more the fact it's based on the nForce2 chipset. Built-in dual monitor and Dolby 5.1 support, plus ATA-150 (I think - might be ATA-133).
Cheers,
Ian
... or, isn't this just the Apple G4 Cube done two years belatedly and considerably less prettily by the PC world...
For all those people who have been waiting for an XPC with socket A *and* AGP, it seems finally Shuttle are releasing one. I noticed the SK41G seems to have been released.. See the shuttle website here and here.
Need I say more? Try to buy parts for the thing when it goes down.. good luck.
I'm using a shuttle PIII/ddr mb that I couldn't afford. It has everything, it was given to me when the capicators popped off it.
Easy to fix, though..
I'm posting this on my sg51 as we speak.
The ALC650 may not the be the greatest of sound cards, but it does serve its purpose quite adequately. I've used mine as an mp3 mixer (the 5.1 audio and dj software allows you match beats rather easily) for dance parties without significant problems. You should know, however, that getting the sound to work in Linux requires a great deal of fiddling; i.e. using different AC 97 ALSA drivers made for other cards, and once you finally get it working, you find that your browser sometimes hangs when it tries to play certain flash media while you're running XMMS, thus I've had to turn off flash in my browser. If anyone knows a workaround for this, please post a reply.
There are also some other properties of shuttle systems worth noting.
The network card is NOT IEEE compliant... i.e., they never registered their MAC address and so, the LAN I am on refuses to recognize it, so I had to use my only pci slot for a networking card.
Other than that, I love my little machine. I bought it because I do a bit of research in graphical programming and a good deal of modeling in Maya, and it handles batch renders quite quickly with a 2.5 GHz Pentium 4. Since I am a student, I often need to take my work home over breaks and I didn't want to comprimise power by getting a laptop. It's one of the most portable desktop computer I've seen and has met my needs quite reasonably.
Overall, with the exception of a few sound issues in Linux and the network card, I have few complaints. XP runs quite well, as does Slack 8.0, and there's nothing better than building a machine that is twice as fast and one quarter the size of your roommates' massive towers.
You are not a unique and individual sig.
"I would rather see a PC made the same size/look as a standard piece of audio equipment..."
There are several to choose from. Check ExoticPC (which is where I bought my case.) In particular, check out the DIGN Home Theater case, the D-Vine case, and their CoolerMaster line.
My favorite is the DIGN case, which is absolutely gorgeous. It would look incredibly stylish in any home theater. You can even get the display for it and program it to show the MP3/DVD that is playing... I mean, the sky is the limit. Of course, it's $229.95 plus shipping, so you pay through the nose for those good looks.
If you're seriously interested in creating a home theater PC, I'd look no further than these cases.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
I know perhaps the whole idea of the XPC is that you buy the bare bones and insert the rest of the components yourself, but has anyone found a distributor that sells the machines completely-prebuilt? I've been looking for someone who does that, for a university project, and many companies are very willing to sell the basic case + motherboard, but not so keen when you ask them to equip it for you..
How noisy is this thing? I didn't see any mention of that in the review.
Based upon the reviews so far, install a decent 60 GB ATA-133 hard drive, a Toshiba SD-R1202 CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive, the upcoming ATI Radeon 9500 Pro video card, an Intel Pentium 4 2.53 GHZ CPU and 512 MB of DDR333 DDR-SDRAM into the case--it could be a very nice gaming system that will run most games decently fast and even support SDPIF out for full Dolby Digital 5.1/DTS surround decoding for DVD movies.
Funny, looks a lot like that Alienware case they are using in their new Media Center.
Now you really can build your own, assuming Microsoft would allow us to purchase that version of XP directly.
I bought one of their systems using that case, and was very impressed. The heat pipes were pretty cool as well. Although the system is pretty cramped, and I had to use the provided cables due to space constraints, the system is running very well, and my sister is happy with it.
Shuttle gets two beer glasses up from me.
My brother and I just put one of these together for our Dad... the case and motherboard rock! Everything was clear and concise, and there were no mishaps. The 2.53GHz processor is as cool as a cucumber via the heatpipe.
Looking at the heatpipe, it was reminiscent of the old headers on cars from the 50s. However, this heatpipe was aluminum or some other light, heat conductive shiny metal.
I can say nothing but good things about this system!
--
WWJD? JWRTFM!
I recently bought and assembled one of the earlier Shuttle SV25 XPCs. It has a Via C3 866 & 256Mb or RAM, and except for 3D, its performance is pretty good. Assuming that Shuttle have improved, then these new versions should be pretty awesome, although I'd wait for the Athlon version.
The only thing which generally won't work with XPCs is the Savage graphics, 2D is pretty generic, but there is NO 3D support under Linux. Every other device was identified by RH7.3 and booted and worked no problem.
The only warning which I would give, is to ensure that whilst tinkering inside the case, that you do turn off the power, Shuttle forgot to cover bits of electrically live metal, and I found this out the hard way. The mains inlet, (which is unfused) is so very close to the CD power connector, and whilst tidying the CD power cables (with the machine off) I took a jolt, off of uncovered mains pins on that socket.
Believe it or not there are actually hard core, fully dedicated gamers who's lives revolve around. . .an older game or two.
For me it's RB3D and especially Grand Prix Legends, a game now over four years old.
The mini ITX looks just the LAN party ticket for these games, in fact, I'm intending to use one of these boards built into a custom pedal set to make a "PCless" PC. Everything will just plug in to the pedal set base.
It's small enough and some "super" joysticks are now big enough that you could do something very similar with a joystick base. 7"x7" Joystick base, very stable, lets you rest your hands on it for extra stability AND. . . contains the entire PC!
It's a brand new world out there folks.
KFG
What? An unsigned 16bit word only? Its time for a new standard that uses 64bit unsigned double long words!
Maybe I'm missing something, but why would anyone need two serial ports?
One would think a computer like this would be mostly legacy free. The last computer I built was (using the Abit IT-7) and I haven't missed my PS2 or serial ports one bit.
Couldn't something more useful have been put in their place instead? Like a RCA/s-video out, as this thing would be great to create some sort of media box. Even a standard printer port would be a ton more useful.
Or maybe shuttle has a product like this that I just don't know about?
Casual Games/Downloads
Was your friend writing a paper.. on the pc and it was like.. beep beep bip blip bleep bleep bleep bleep and then... like... halfa his paper was GONE. and he was like... unnnhhh...? Then he got a shuttle...and everything just worked...on the first try!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
...do I fit a GeForceFX into one of these babies?
I purchased one of the original Shuttle Spacewalker systems a little over a year ago.
The system does it's job, but I have a big issue with it -- noise. The thing has a CPU fan that runs hard and fast. Since the CPU fan must be low profile, you really do not have a choice in replacing it with something else. There is a fan in the back of the chassis that pushes air out, adding a little noise. And finally, the power supply is very noisy, and designed very badly. It pulls hot air into it from inside the case, and pushes hot air back inside the case -- there is no transient air.
Had I know about the noise issues with the Shuttle Spacewalker before I bought it, I would not have.
I do not know if any of the modern versions have fixed these problems, but I would be wary of it.
Where are the Athlon Processor models?
Why was the parent moderated upward? He called for the removal of support for most of the equipment that you would connect to a computer. Think about it, there's only a few different things that connect to a printer, USB, or firewire ports, but many, many more devices made over the past 20 years have RS232 ports. So, we should just throw them all away?
I second the above. I knew there was a reason I didn't buy one of these the last time around, and you just brought it back to me. I couldn't bring myself to shell out that much dough for something with such a bizarre design flaw. And it's such a small thing, I was hoping they'd fixed it by now.
Based on the good stuff we heard here on SlashDot we bought 4 Shuttle S25's to use as servers for our office, and we were pleased with how the worked...at first.
However, over the last 6 months we have now had power supplies go bad 4 times and required us to get new power supplies from Shuttle with many weeks of delay. Even one of the replacement power supplies flaked. Of the original 4 shuttles, only one still has the original power supply.
Fortunately for us, one of the 4 shuttles was designated a cold spare, so we didn't experience much down time, but it was quite annoying to have so many power supplies go bad. We don't have time to move the servers over to more reliable systems, so for now we have purchased some spare power supplies from Shuttle.
Right now we would be very hesitant to buy more modern Shuttles until we understand more about why there was such a huge rate of failure on the power supplies of their S25's.
-- Herder of Cats
I got sucked into this subtle advertising scheme last time, without checking Linux compatibility and got burned.
If this is the right machine for you then great, but be sure to look into the details first.
Usage: fortune -P [-f] -a [xsz] Q: file [rKe9] -v6[+] file1
i have about 20 sv24s, 4 ss40s, and 20 ss51gs. i've had 5 of the sv24 power supply fans go bad, but never the actual power supply.
this does appear to be a sv24/sv25 issue; the "heat pipe"-based units (ss40*, ss50*, etc) all have only one fan in the unit: an 80mm easily-replaceable sunon.
i have experienced instability on the ss40s (fixed via replacement) and power supply issues with the sv24/sv25s. i didn't use an sv24 as a router because the power supply had a fan, and i'm glad i made that choice now.
with the good amount of experience with these systems, and i wouldn't hesistate to recommend the ss50 series to anyone.
...does it STAY QUIET as the fan's bearings wear out?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
These machines are actually really cool, I had my doubts but I picked up a Shuttle SS51g (SiS chipset, not intel) about 2 weeks ago. Currently I've got the following in it:
:( ) and 3D mark 2001se pulls over 13k 3dmarks at 1024x768x32, with 210+ fps on the low detail benchmarks. Overall I think this is a great chassis & MB combo. Like I said, the only real issue is when you cram it full it starts to get a little warm.
P4 2.24G
512MB PC2700 ddr
Radeon 9700Pro AGP
2x Maxtor 80G 7200rpm ATA/133
1 Teac 48x burner
Under normal working conditions (99F cpu, 110F drives) the heat pipe and single fan (+power supply fan) seem pretty adequate. The only time I notice the heat start to spike up is when I'm really pounding the drives and when I'm gaming, (CPU at about 109-111F, and drives about 120-130F). I think the majority of the heat build up is because there is only about a 1/4" gap between the 2 hard drives and there is no real airflow between them, also the fan on the Radeon only has about 3/8" clearance from the outside aluminum wall of the case.
I'm going to cut a blowhole in the case over the GPU fan and I might cut a small intake slot on the front of the case to allow some airflow across the disks, although I'm hesitant because I don't want to damage the aesthetic of the case.
From a performance perspective I've been really impressed (I replaced a Dell P330 workstation with this machine). The integrated perephrial set leaves little to be desired (I'd like an spdif coaxial digial out from the integrated audio for the old reciever I'm using with it, but that's it) 6x USB ports eliminated my need for a usb hub. The integrated ATA133 controllers provide throughput approaching what I was seeing from a PERC3/dc with 2-10K rpm U3 160 disks (no raid) that were in the P330 (even with 128MB cache). Memory performance and overall system is also right on target. I primarily built this as a game box, (running WinXP
01:36AM up 426 days, 2:46, 1 user, load average: 0.14, 0.11, 0.05
One gripe - it does not have a connector for the SPDIF output of a DVD player on the motherboard. This means that SPDIF pass-through will not work, and the Dolby AC3 track must be processed by the CPU instead of just sent directly to the stereo receiver.
BTW - I also have three SS51G machines with Pentium 4 2.53GHz CPUs running as database caching servers (Linux RH7.2). They've run without any hiccups under load for several months now. Great performers, and I think the SB51G should be similar.
Kudos to Shuttle!
---- Luke "To boldly go where no one has gone before..."
Has anyone tried to do this?
Especially the Athlon models could win a lot in terms of quietness. Remember: The mobile versions are relativly similar in price.
I prefer a quieter system for 100 MHz more. You barely notice the 100 MHz, but you'll notice a CPU, that consumes 30 Watts compared to a CPU that consumes 60 Watts.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
I bought a Shuttle ss40g for one reason over this one: I needed 2 PCI cards because I needed a portable recording workstation. Installation was quite easy and I was amazed by the quietness. If it's too loud, you can always replace the fan. Also, be sure you set the fan to variable cool so that it's not always running at max RPMs, that helps a lot with the noise issue. Basically, this thing is plenty quiet to have in a recording studio.
One thing I was surprised about was that the cooling pipes actually work. What they are are a bunch of tubes coming out of the heat sink which connect to a 2nd heat sink that is placed behind the case fan, so the case fan's exhaust is towards the direction of this and so blows both the ambient heat out of the case as well as cools off the heatsink. Works like a charm, the exhaust heat isn't too much problem.
I read that someone had "heat spikes" with 2 hard drives. These shuttles are *not* built to support two internal hard drives. Even with round cables, you'd still have to force them in there and mine is feeling quite cramped already without a second drive in there. The cable it comes with is a master only cable.
I wanted to install an Audigy 2 and a Delta 44 into this thing to test out hard drive recording and editing at 24 bit. FedEx screwed up my shipment so I didn't get the Audigy 2 yet, so I was forced to use the Delta 44 and the on board sound.
First off, I heard no 'artifacting' from the PCI bus(?) which is actually a first for me with onboard sound. When I got into some really hard working directx filtering, the sound did break up (which I had expected) using Reality with a Piano Sample bank. The Delta, however, using ASIO actually outperformed the onboard sound and ran flawlessly.
This thing is well engineered, and well worth the cash. It's not too proprietary that stuff can't be replaced (fans going noisy when the ball bearings get old). It's the first 'custom-ish' formfactor and case that really feels like I have a full-powered computer that's just small.
Everything is easily accessable even given the size, the pci cards screw in from the outside.
Now for the downsides:
I've seen ripoff brands that have a handle. A handle on the top would have been nice, but the handles I've seen on the other models are round and huge - If they would have added another 2 inches to the height of the case and inset a handle so the top remained flat this would be that much closer to being a completely perfect thing.
The SPDIF position is odd (out on the front, in on the back)
I would have preferred USB2.0 standard onboard over the firewire (err, or over the old USB). My model came with a USB2.0 pci card, but, no room for it.
Yes, the onboard graphics are garbage - to be expected. Perhaps I'll go for a PCI graphics card when they make the Extigy 2. I wanted to reduce the amount of stuff hanging off of this, though (already have the logitech wireless receiver, a USB ethernet card, the delta breakout box, and the junk needed for 5.1 sound)...
honestly, the worst thing about this box is that it gets dwarfed by all the accessories coming out of it!
-- The truth is the only thing that nobody will believe.
I'D LIKE TO BE BURIED INDIAN-STYLE, where they put you up on a high rack,
above the ground. That way, you could get hit by meteorites and not even
feel it.
-- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988.
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