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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.
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.
According to their website: "Dubbed XPC, short for 'Next Generation 'PC'"
why they put the SPDIF Out on the front and the In on the back.
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!
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