World's First BTX Mini-PC

CTZ writes "We have direct information from CES 2005 show floor that covers Shuttle's first BTX Mini-PC. It's also the world's first BTX system ever displayed. "Shuttle also had a rather sizable booth with an entire line of their products displayed, as it can be seen from the images throughout this article. Perhaps the most important interesting product they had on the show floor was the world's first XPC based on Intel's BTX standard. Shuttle is looking to make the system affordable, so they have decided to use steel for the chassis instead of aluminum. According to Shuttle, this will bring the cost of the XPC system down by $130.00. The only downside, as some may perceive it, is that the BTX XPC system will be 1" wider than regular XPCs, but regardless, you can expect the same quality from Shuttle."

Comments

Thanks editors for doing your job!

[garcia]

Throughout the article? Either you are exaggerating beyond the normal limits of exaggeration or I am missing something here... I see exactly TWO images. One of a LCD panel and one of a square box that has some sort of tray (DVDRW/CDRW?). Woohoo!

Let's not forget that the "article" is little more than a press release about a product that saves you $130! Saves me $130 from what? $1000? $2000? $more? Let's make sure that the editors do some weeding out of blatant advertising of crap next time.

This "article" didn't tell me much about the product, really didn't like anywhere but to other advertisements, and left me guessing.

Thanks for posting this to the main page. I really appreciate it.

Re:Thanks editors for doing your job!

[LoadStar]

Agreed. I went back to the article twice because I thought I might have missed some hidden "read more" or "more pictures here" link. Nope. Just about as much info in the summary as in the article itself, and two lousy pictures. Wa-hoo.

Re:Thanks editors for doing your job!

[slaker]

Since most XPCs run between $250 and $400, $130 is a very substantial savings. I like the XPC form factor for some things (not as HTPCs - I want components that match my AV equipment, but as office machines), but I've found the cost off-putting compared to traditional case, PSU and motherboard arrangements.

Re:Thanks editors for doing your job!

[grazzy]

It's posted to slashdot by the same guy who runs the website. What do you expect? :)

Weight?

[eln]

Won't steel add weight to the thing?

Also, the one and only experience I've had with Shuttles was when the one we had had its power supply fail. Hardly a good statistical sampling, but it was fairly new, so I personally have a negative view of Shuttle quality, but I may be in the minority on that one.

Re:Weight?

[Squatchman]

It isn't heavy enough until I can kill my cat with it.

Re:Weight?

[Elwood P Dowd]

So it would have to be at least as heavy as a collapsing wave form?

How big IS this thing?

[fuzzy12345]

Given the relative prices of aluminum and steel, I'm picturing something the size of my desk! How can aluminum vs. steel construction represent a price difference of over $100?

In other CES news...

[Leomania]

One class of products seen on the floor at CES that has generated a lot of interest is the SEX (Slashdot-Effect eXterminator) that promises to end the near instantaneous meltdown caused by the DDoS^H^H^H^H heavy loads placed upon sites linked to by that "News for Nerds" site.

"See that big hole in the side there?" asks Ned Farblestrom of BlackHole Technologies, pointing to a 3/4 inch hole in the side of the case. "That's where we hook up a big fat pipe to handle the load. Those Slashdotters won't be able to fill that up!"

For want of better information

[asliarun]

here's an Anandtech article on BTX:-
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=187 6

Re:For want of better information

[albn]

The specs look pretty nice, but Shuttle does not list a price on the web site. So, I looked on Google and found a price on ZipZoomFly's web site. For $449, I have to say that is not a bad price at all although I would think other places will have nicer designs for a better price. As for the article, it is not available at the moment, but oh well, it does not seem it is worth looking at anyway judging from the posts here.

Also, I have to agree about the steel case... yikes. I suppose if you add some brackets you can bolt it on your desk to make sure nobody walks away with your new BTX form factor box. :D

Thanks for the other article... it is much better.

A Much Better Article

[Hack Jandy]

Again, AnandTech saves the day

BTX: http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i =2317&p=15
Shuttle: http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i =2317&p=6

More Shuttle: http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i =2317&p=5

God forbid CTX actually covered the show instead of just rewriting press releases...

Steel saves $130? WTF?

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Shuttle is looking to make the system affordable, so they have decided to use steel for the chassis instead of aluminum. According to Shuttle, this will bring the cost of the XPC system down by $130.00.

Can someone explain to me how in the hell this can be so? Even with a 3x markup, that's $43. There is absolutely no way that a switch to steel can save that much money. $10 maybe, but not $130. Someone is pissing on our backs and telling us it's raining.

"You can expect the same quality from Shuttle..."

[dpbsmith]

That's Slashvertising plain and simple.

Image mirrors (and some more pics from shuttle)

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, the article is hardly loading for me.. so here are some mirrors of the 2 images from this article and some other images from some other article about the Shuttle stand (I forget where that was, thanks to the original site whoever it was).

Link
Link

and from the other article...

Link
Link
Link
Link
Link

Steel?

[phyruxus]

I'm surprised that using steel instead of aluminum would cut $130 off the price. Aluminum only costs about $0.83/lb. Does it cost a lot to shape or something? I'd expect the harder steel to cost more to work.

Steel is stronger so maybe they could use less, and not add too much weight. Of course every ounce they add will cost someone in shipping.

Anyone know why switching to steel saves so much $?

"Small Form Factor"???

[jo42]

Is it me, or are not these so called "small form factor" machines getting bigger and bigger? To the point that they take up as much room, if not more, as compared to what we used to call a "medium tower case"? Hmmm??

Now worldwide?

[mccalli]

From the article:

In North America alone, Shuttle retails around 10,000 XPC systems per month and now they are getting a demand from consumers throughout the world. Because of the demand, Shuttle has decided to retail their XPC systems to the European and Brazilian markets.

I've had a Shuttle system on my desk for the last two and a half years, and I'm in the UK.

I always liked the idea and looks, but dislike the noise - I don't know how more recent models compare (I have an SB51G) and would be interested to, err, hear...

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Now worldwide?

[Moridineas]

I had one of the very early shuttle models--FX25 or something that like, and it was loud as hell. Now we're using a bunch of SS51G's I think is the model, P4's, at work, and you can barely hear them, period. They're great.

Worthless

[shamowfski]

Hey Look! I'm playing Duke Nukem Forever on my BTX form factor PC. Thanks to 3DRealms and Intel for making this possible...

you can expect the same quality from Shuttle.

[commo1]

Quality? From SHUTTLE? These are the guys who send wave after wave of CPU destroying VRMs on their boards. 6 months, dead CPU...

Re: you can expect the same quality from Shuttle.

[commo1]

For a simple home server, I'd recommend the following: AOpen (yes, AOpen, they use SPI power supplies, very tough) 340D cases, very nice and reasonably well made for a good price. or: Antec ARIA case, a bit more expensive, but quiet, and very cool looking, also cool temeperature wise because of the aluminum construction. Asus or Intel motherboard. Believe it or not, the Intel boards are reasonably priced (at least when compared to Tier I like Asus, Supermicro, etc....) Then, you can pick and choose other components such as HD, optical drives, etc.... and chances are you're not going got get stuck with a Realtek NIC on-board. For what it's worth, we build industrial servers and CPE PCs for companies deploying all across North America and the world. In their case, an extra $100 on a system for increased MTBF is worth it.... not sure what your case is. As far as the shuttle stuff, we've noticed a huge number of these coming back over the years. We stopped selling them long ago because of inital quality, but out-of-warranty claims from the competition on personal use has been staggering lately with regard to the voltage regulators in front of the CPU.... litteraly, they blow the CPUs because of bad regulation and introduction of off-frequency ripple.

Re: you can expect the same quality from Shuttle.

[chrome]

Have to agree with you here.

Got two dead shuttles littering my living room. I ended up ripping the CPU out of my A64 one and putting it into a normal mobo and its been working fine since then.

I like the form factor, but none of the manufacturers are making very reliable kit. If you want reliable, try Asus or Gigabyte mobos in a standard case.

The small form factor sure looks cute, but its not buying you anything in the way of reliability.

So?

[gelfling]

Is there a sudden crash in the worldwide availabilty of desk space? Especially given that most non slaves get flat screens now?

First off I can see tremendous fragility problems with monkeying with the screen angle and flopping the screen and the entire computer onto the desk, or worse, off the desk.

I guess you'll see these soon on every desk in every TV show soon but in terms of reality it doesn't really answer much of a need.

Cost of steel

[sjbe]

I'm surprised that using steel instead of aluminum would cut $130 off the price. Aluminum only costs about $0.83/lb. Does it cost a lot to shape or something? I'd expect the harder steel to cost more to work.

I'm an engineer specialized in manufacturing and I've done some work recently sourcing steel for stampings. Steel prices, along with other raw materials, have gone through the roof in the last year or so largely due to demand from China. (I was there recently and you cannot believe the amount of construction going on unless you see it. Absolutely amazing.) As of a month ago, I was getting quotes on steel that were generally in the range of $0.45-$0.57/lb depending on the alloy you wanted and where you needed it. (this is in North America) If you want forgings or something shaped, that will add to the cost. On a weight basis the steel can't cost more than $15-25 (and that's generous) given the amount of material in a typical case.

$130 seems like a lot just for materials savings unless they were using unusual alloys or really getting ripped off on the labor. Steel is actually pretty easy to work with, often easier than aluminum in my experience. Aluminum is so soft you often have to be careful with coolants and cutting speeds. There are structural considerations sometimes too. Aluminum requires different amounts of material for the same structural strength. But the difference isn't exactly night and day. Frankly I'm having a hard time figuring out where $130 in material savings would come from since the amount of material is so small.

Production costs?

[dhakbar]

Maybe it has nothing to do with the material costs, and everything to do with the actual production of the case?

... shuttle ...

[ninjagin]

I have four shuttles (all are SS51Gs -- one for gaming, one is my media center PC, one is my Linux box and the fourth is a development machine) and they're all great machines. Reliable, durable, and the three that run the cool, power-sipping celerons are pretty quiet. My gaming shuttle, sporting a 2.8 P4 and a Radeon 9800 Pro AGP card, is a lot warmer and also noisier, but still less noisy than full-size ATX boxes I've built with five fans in them.

So call me a shuttle fanboy -- I can take it. As soon as they offer a flex-ATX that takes the 64-bit AMD athlon AND has support for PCI-express, I'll upgrade the gaming box.

Some points have been raised that BTX is a more bloated form factor than the traditional shuttle flex-ATX that we've been used to, and I'd agree. I think that the increase in size is due to a couple things:

1. Instead of just being smaller, SFF systems are increasingly being judged on the features they incorporate. New features add heat and often need more space on-board when they're first introduced. The size of a flex-ATX board layout was probably becoming restrictive to the desire to add new features.
2. Given that they needed the additional space, adding a half-inch on each side of a shuttle isn't that big of a bloat. These machines are very compact right from the start, and the lack of ample space for some of the wider AGP cards (or vid card heatpipes/other vid card cooling solutions) has been the subject of some shuttle SFF user grousing for awhile now.

When I first started building PCs some 4 years ago, I became used to having to unravel driver and moboard firmware issues as part of the job. With each of my shuttles -- each sporting a different OS -- I've had zero issues. Linux support has been great (I've only tried Fedora Core, RedHat9 and Suse, so the sample size ain't all that large, admittedly).

For me, the biggest plusses of XPCs are that they have fewer fans (and are, hence, more quiet), are very portable, and where I used to have one biga$$ tower I can have three shuttles. If I were putting together a cluster/server farm, they'd probably be a good choice, too, because I could cram lots of them into a small space.

SFFs are getting a lot more exposure, and I think that's a good thing. That Shuttle is emerging into the BTX space is also a good thing, imho.