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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.
Should check out the MiniITX boards from VIA. MiniITX. Smaller than this, and quite efficient. Not really a gamers system though.
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)
According to their website: "Dubbed XPC, short for 'Next Generation 'PC'"
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1741&p =1
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!@!$
Isn't port location and Chassis compatibility part of the ATX standard????
Not really. On most (standard) chassises, the IO backplate is removable. You can pop it out and replace it, or not use one at all. There is a de-facto standard arrangement that is used by most boards (and the plate that comes with most cases is designed for), but many times when integrating different combinations of ports it is not only desirable, but necessary, to deviate, and the standard accomodates this. The one thing on that box that is kind of abnormal is that the backplate seems to be held on with screws, and might even (I've never been inside one of those things) be physically attached to the motherboard, like most NLX systems. They could have gone a step further and used a different screw arrangement also, to make mounting third-party mainboards impossible. I wouldn't put it past them.
(aside: its really a shame that NLX and other riser-card systems are largely dead now, with a riser you can build machines that small or smaller, with full-size, uninhibited expansion slots.)
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
More like 1995, that's when IEEE 1344 ("Firewire") first hit the mainstream. The company I was working for back then purchased AVID systems (at over $100K each) that were running on 68040 Macs. Even then Mac folks were splorkin' all over this mythic "firewire".
Actually, the heat tube works quite well. Heat tubes are used in many high end servers were cooling is critical. In fact, heat tubes can be better than the traditional heat sink/fan combo. There is a review of the athlon version of this system at http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2002q3/shuttle- ss40g/index.x?pg=1 complete with benchmarks and comparison tests. So, if it's good enough to keep your athlon cool, it's good enough for just about anything.
There's no sig like SIGSEG
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.
"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!
It appears that Directron will build the system for you for an additional $29.
http://store.yahoo.com/directron/sb51g.html
Not sure if installation also includes OS installation or just hardware components.
I bought my SS51g from Directron (quite happy with them) and put my system together myself in well under one hour.
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Cata logue_Fully_Configured__Systems_111.html#afs_2d009 _2doc
Its actually the ss51 which is much the same but with the SiS chipset (no hyperthreading support).
I have a SS51g with a 2.4-GHz P4, DVD/CD-RW and 120-GB HD installed (SiS651 chipset instead of the Intel 845GE chipset, same otherwise including the heatpipe heatsink/fan combo). The system is pretty quiet where the fan only speeds up and gets noisy prior to system shutdown, aside from one instance while ripping a CD; this is after I reduced the CPU temp at which the fan speeds up from the default BIOS setting (I forgot the exact temp but I dropped it about 15 degrees Celcius if I remember correctly). The top of the case is barely perceptively warm to the touch too.
Wait for Shuttle's SN40 (which shouldn't be too long). It uses the Nvidia Nforce2 chipset. The MCP's audio (no TRON jokes, please :) is much better than AC97. Then again, who's audio chips aren't better than AC97.
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.
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.
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