It’s been a while since we have heard from Shuttle, and for pretty good reason. Many years ago if you wanted a small form factor PC that could pack a punch your only real option was Shuttle. It came to the point where some of the biggest manufacturers in the world decided to enter the game, Gigabyte had a crack at it along with Epox and ASUS but no one was ever able to stand out like Shuttle.
Shuttle became so well known as a brand that people didn’t call these “Small Form Factor PCs”, rather just Shuttles. You would think that it was going to be a company like ASUS or Gigabyte that would place the most competition, but instead it quickly turned around and became companies like Antec who started to release SFF housing, from there people were picking up more well known motherboards to suit the case and Shuttle seemed to slowly die away.
At the peak of SFF computing Shuttle was great because the global LAN scene was huge, people didn’t want to cart around big cases and Shuttle gave you the opportunity to have something that could fit under one arm and be transported with very little effort. As broadband internet has become cheaper though, LANs have slowly died off and the internet gaming revolution really kicked. This basically meant that having a big case wasn’t a big deal anymore since you had no intentions of lugging it around to the local LAN event.
All these contributing factors seemed to make Shuttle nothing more than a distant memory, the good news is though that they have decided to release a new line-up under the “Glamor” series name which we hope can revive the love of our Shuttle again.
The particular model we are looking at today is the Shuttle SG33G5 Pro using the latest onboard graphics chipset from Intel, the G33. Where does Shuttle best fit in the market these days? We’ll have a look at the SG33G5 Pro and see where in our house its best suited for.
