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Shuttle SDXi Water-Cooled SFF PC
MojoKid writes "Shuttle Computer single-handedly invented the SFF PC or Small Form-Factor PC a few years back. Their line of XPC mini-PC systems, no bigger than a toaster oven, has evolved nicely over the years. This article takes a look at the features and performance of a new XPC from Shuttle that is built on a i975X/Core 2 Duo platform and is designed with the PC enthusiast in mind. The SDXi features a number of unique features like a built-in water-cooler for Radeon GPU-based graphics cards and a slick, flamed-out paint job that you've just got to see." Update: 07/08 23:53 GMT by KD : Here is a link to the version split over 12 pages, in which the images are clickable thumbnails.
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The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
The article mentions a problem that I have had with Shuttle systems all along: Noise. Even though it's water cooled, they found noise to still be a problem.
If I could be choosy, this is what I want in my typical SFF system:
- One full size x16 PCI express slot for my big graphics card (that should fit and be adequately cooled)
- Space for two hard drives in the chassis, along with one optical drive
- Near silence except when doing something intense, like gaming or encoding
- Of course, small.
When will I get such a system!?
Since when have toaster ovens been small? Smaller than a shoebox would be good, smaller than a toaster is cool, but a toaster oven?
Wake me when they're smaller than a box of Pop-Tarts (that's an ISO unit of measure, isn't it?)...
Just junk food for thought...
Shuttle Computer single-handedly invented the SFF PC or Small Form-Factor PC a few years back....
I've read some fanboi tosh on slashdot in my time, but that is so wrong it's not even ironically funny. I'd delve into prior art but I really can't be bothered: take your pick from any computer manufacturer and they'll have had something SFF.
I suppose they did attempt to make SFF attractive for the living room, but again that was nothing new: geeks have been doing that for years to try to appease other halves.
I'm still waiting for the very small form factor - uATX, picoATX and smaller FF's to come way down in price. The premiums they get for a small machine are obscene. And the units that don't need a fan like Via C3s are so absurdly underpowered you have to wonder why they don't embed the whole system in a network appliance.
I was on an SFF kick a few years back, built several SFF systems for friends. I thought they were the greatest thing. Then I came across an SK43G that wouldn't be stable.
a d/50166/
Here's a long thread on Sudhian discussing it:
http://www.sudhian.com/index.php?/forums/viewthre
I've built lots of computers. I know there are quirks and problems. What really frustrated me is that shuttle did *nothing* to help an obvious design or manufacturing error. So, I was stuck with bad hardware. That leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and makes me VERY leary to try another shuttle, or to recommened one to a friend.
For this friend, I ended up taking the system back, swapping out parts and getting him a different box. He LOVED the shuttle design, so it was a similar system. I have the SK43G around here somewhere, still not sure if I trust it.
Real Geeks have no "other halves" you insensitive clod !!!
I think you're at cross-purposes here. You want a quiet system, but you also want a big graphics card. Most gfx cards today have their own cooling fans (meaning one more noise source in the system). Plus, you want a PCIe x16 card, which means more bandwidth, which implied higher CPU requirements (hey, something's gotta supply those polygon requirements), faster RAM, faster HD (unless you wanna cut your frame rate waiting for textures to load), all of which mean more power, which equals more cooling, which equals more noise. Unless you can come up with some way to cool your system with dry ice or some other high-thermal-differential substance, you're going to have to move larger quantities of a less-efficient medium around.
Just junk food for thought...
From the article:
"And the 1337 series, which is a complete system based on this chassis"
It really must be c00l.
From the picture that thing looks half as big as a mid-tower. That's not what I'd call a "small PC".
When I think small computer, I think Apple Mac mini and AOpen miniPC.
Kneejerk flamebait mods: Avert your eyes.
c leid=986
t =19838b arebones-system-7831.htmlp =673332
Let me start out by saying HotHardware itself is nothing better than a middle-of-the-pack hardware review site. If I remember correctly, they're a generic offshoot of one of the more major tech sites that tries (too hard) to appeal to enthusiasts but comes across as nothing more than stiff corporate whores desperately spewing cool lingo to draw hapless internet goers into viewing their adbortion (SPELLING INTENTIONAL) of a website. And I'm OK with that.
What I'm not OK with is their oh so blatant blogspam bullshit they send to slashdot. Wow guys, you reviewed a small form factor PC. If that's not front page worthy, I don't know what is! Even worse, the only link in their submission was to their own site.
In the spirit of sharing, I've decided to help out slashdotters who might be genuinely interested in the product beyond a "sweet flames, bro!" 10 pager (it's a fucking barebones system!) fluff review with some informative links. Let's start with a direct link to hothardware's printable version of the page.
http://www.hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?arti
That wasn't so hard, was it guys? Oh sure, it might cut into your ad revenue, but it would be disingenuous of me to accuse you guys of submitting this for the shallow purpose of bumping ad revenue, right? Right?!
In other news, I was looking for alternate reviews of this system. What did I find? HotHardware are apparently a bunch of linkwhoring board spamming bastards. Witness the evidence:
http://www.elitebastards.com/forum/viewtopic.php?
http://www.dvhardware.net/review/31338
http://forums.hardwarelogic.com/f68/shuttle-sdxi-
http://www.mbreview.com/article.php?sid=11683
http://www.motherboards.org/forums/viewtopic.php?
Maybe the hardware review business is now just as inbred as most news blog sites. I don't know. What I do know is I spent way too much time writing this post. And this story is beyond worthless.
Shuttle did well with their innovative heat pipe system, which is a rigid, sealed unit connecting a heat exchanger atop the CPU with one near an air outlet and fan. The case and motherboard were designed around the cooling system. That's what makes their small form factor PCs workable without overheating problems. We used those things outdoors in summer, while field testing robots, and they held up well. I've never had a Shuttle PC overheat, even at 105F ambient.
But the new graphics card cooling technology looks like a tacky afterthought. Big hoses all over the place. Too much plumbing. It comes with a paint job that might look good on a pickup with a lift job. So you get a sense of the target market.
If you like this sort of thing, go read "Soon, I Will be Invincible!", the fictional memoir of an evil mad scientist who tries to take over the world. It's the classic dweeb fantasy, with appropriate interior decoration.
Words cannot express how much a flame paintjob puts me off buying something. The computer could run off 16 cores and come with 2TB of HDD space pre-filled with porn, with a robotic arm that gives handjobs every hour on the hour and I still wouldn't want it with that fucking paintjob. I mean really, how big can the market be for "PC enthusiasts" who are 12 years old?
"Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests."
Nice to note that the only non-UNIX based OS on the market continues to come from MS. Too bad such a nice little box is held back by such a stoic, muzzle-loading OS.
The main problem with barebones is cool this down. In this confined space there is a lot of heat to be evacuated sense and it needs a lot of noisy fans. It looks like a toaster and it is like toaster in every sense.
I wonder if they have figure out a system with its entire components dipped in oil.
I have a "Small Form Factor" toaster box that is from BioStar. It's the same sort of thing as the Shuttle. It is a little noisier than I prefer.
The truly SFF, quiet computer that I have also been using for over a year is a Mac Mini. If you don't need one of those high-wattage video cards, the Mini is fast and about 1/6th the size of any of these "toaster" boxen. (I have the Mini sitting ~on top~ of the SFF PC, along with a USB 2.0 external hub.)
You can also drop a Core 2 Duo CPU into the Mini. (The current models are Core Duo.) The upgrade path for my SFF PC isn't as good.
For those of us who don't want "gaming" graphics and want a quiet computer to run OS X, Linux, or Windows, I don't see many options better than the Mac Mini.
Please note: I am not Steve Jobs. If I were, I surely would have said, "Boom. There it is," at least once in this post.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Note that the x6800 costs nearly 5 times more than the x2 6000.
8 2E168191037738 2E16819115001
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N
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My friend canned his SFF box in favor of a mid size ATX tower about four months ago. He upgraded the video card to the GeForce 7 series, and after doing so, the temperature sensitive fan on the video card stayed at its maximum, and incredibly annoying, RPM's all the while it was on.
Shuttles won't be quiet and heat efficient for a long time. If you want a system with a fast, multicore processor, and a beefy video card, be a man and buy a tower.
Although, after my friend moved some components to a new case, I snagged an old processor from work and turned his SFF box into my server. With a 220 watt PSU, it's a very affordable "leave me on all day" type of PC that stays out of sight, and, since it doesn't do much, it is actually very quiet.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
KD, hey, so here's the deal. The contract specifies that Slashot will link to the 12 page version of the article WTF are you doing linking to the print version?? Ad money, HELLO?! Do you think we're paying you guys to link our articles for kicks and giggles?
Either this gets fixed by the top of the hour or we expect a full refund.
Regards,
Wanker @ Hot Hardware
Finally in stock, it'd be nice if it's available earilier. Any ways, with only $7.9 usd, am I going to be able to buy it? Lucky available late or I'll score. XD
Then you need a good thermal design. And without meaning to sound like a fanboy, the only commodity PCs with newish CPUs that have a good thermal design are Apple PCs. The iMac is easily the quietist desktop computer out there with a core2duo. The are some pretty good non-Apple PC designs in the laptop world, but not so in desktop land.
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Maybe if it's crammed full of heatpipes and the whole case is a heatsink. Even then, there's a limit to how small it can get without overheating. Otherwise, your choices are:
small and powerful, but noisy
silent and powerful, but big
small and silent, but slow
Shuttle need to get their RMA supply chain sorted out before doing anything.
mediocrity rules, man
Yeah. The Mac mini is a great suggestion for someone who specifically wants a SFF system with a full size PCI Express x16 slot and room for two hard drives. How insightful.
I generally agree although if you want a gamer PC to run quiet you've really got to break this system down into 2 boxes:
1) A "smarts" box with all the solid state parts in it: mobo, cpu, ram, and graphics card. These parts all have higher temperature tolerances (~85C) and put out a lot of heat, especially the graphics card. It's not hard to arrange them in a wind tunnel fashion that allows for the most absurdly large PCI16 cards with the entire front of the box being an intake for single, large, high volume low rpm fan. Lots of air flow not much noise. Installing a fanless high-end graphics card would work very well here for a quiet, fast machine.
2) A storage box, containing the items with moving parts - Dvd drive and hard drives, all connected via eSata. These put out much less heat than a GPU but also can't tolerate much heat - ~55C is the breaking point here. Same windtunnel design except for the Dvd drive handles this nicely - you avoid a major point of contention that the current Shuttle struggles with: keeping that GPU from frying your hard drives. I just don't get why current designs put hard drives over the GPU - heat rises! It's basic science!
That windtunnel design offers great airflow, and simple airflow - which is important because it's hard for system builders to screw it up. Some cases with good airflow exist but the wrong arrangement of parts will kill it - making it simple makes it hard to miss.
It also provides for 2 segments of gamers: the kind with a single big hard drive, and the kind who uses many hard drives, either to break out page, swap, programs and media onto their own drives (that's me), or to run RAID. There could be a super slim storage box with room for an HD and a Dvd drive, for the single HD user wanting to save a little more space; and there could be a big storage box for up to 5 HDs and a Dvd drive.
Anyone who's assembled one of these Shuttles knows a dedicated, simple box for hard drives would simplify PC construction dramatically. Getting those heavy hard drives into that cramped box with fragile things like graphics cards and RAM already sitting in there as hazards is... well... hazardous.
And it would open up some interesting portability options. I could take my Storage box and bring it to a friend's as a super simple way to bring music and movies over - unplug and walk. I could use the Smarts box as a mobile Thin Client. The Smarts box also might let you help a friend diagnose a PC issue: you could plug it into their Storage to quickly tell if they've got a hardware issue (it works!) or software (it's dead). And the larger Storage box could be designed in a way that makes swapping drives simple.
Give me that system!