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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.
Does XPC stand for something or was it chosen just to sound cool?
OLPC Australia
the latest features, like USB 2.0, Firewire..
Yeah, Firewire! It's the latest feature from 1999!
slashdot!=valid HTML
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.
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!@!$
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?
Short answer: Price!
Long answer: Ask anyone who goes to lan parties.
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
why they put the SPDIF Out on the front and the In on the back.
These mini boxes are cheaper, field upgradeable, use standard parts, can have up to 2 Gig of memory, 4X AGP, up to 2 hard drives......and whatta you know it takes up very little space.
Laptops have non-standard parts, most of which are not field replaceable. Laptop parts and repair costs are very expensive. Laptops also have very limited upgrade posibilities and the keyboards are itty bitty. And let's face it, laptops are plugged into an outlet most of the time.
Think of the mini box as space saving computer that's easy on the wallet as it is on the eyes.
"You helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in 17 -- 1976." --George W. Bush, to Queen Elizabeth, Wash
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
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
"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.
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
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
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