SUMMARY: With the push towards the Small Form Factor PCs today its hard to choose from the lineup that is evergrowing. Shuttle started the SFF trend with the XPC line, and has continued to do so. Today Cameron "Sov" Johnson takes a look at the Shuttle SN41G XPC System. How does it fair? Take a look for yourself!
Small Form Factor PCs or SFF as its becoming known as of today is making a huge breakthrough in the enthusiast and hobbyist PC markets. Mini PC’s were started by end users who didn’t want to have their PCs in “crappy old” PC cases and avid LAN goers. After all, it hard to lug around tower and Midi tower cases all across the city and even the state.
Designed in Perspex and wooden boxes in extremely small designs this hobby became a marketing idea for a few companies, amongst them Shuttle. Shuttle has always been in for innovative designs, and pushing the limits of personal computing,
Shuttle first introduced the commercially available SFF based PC, dubbed the XPC line with the SV25 model as the base. Designed AMD Athlon and Duron CPUs. VIA’s KN133 chipset was used to power the system with onboard Savage XP graphics, the performance was less than stellar, but launched Shuttle into the SFF market.
Shuttle needed a new model in with to build the XPC on. Shuttle dumped VIA in favour of SiS, who’s integrated solutions were more appealing, supported DDR SDRAM and proved much faster than any VIA based integrated chipset. The next Athlon based XPC was the SS40G. This baby included the SiS 740 chipset, Firewire and all the other goodies the SV25 brought to the table. Video performance of this model was 40% better than the SV25 with no extra price over the SV25, making it a much more appealing system.
Market demand started to push on an AGP slot on the SFF systems, with SiS unable to provide a AGP slot with the 740 chipset, Shuttle moved back to VIA with the KM266 chipset for the SK41G. This allowed for onboard graphics to be used or an optional AGP 4x video card to be installed into an AGP slot inside the system.
With introduction of the nForce2 IGP chipset with all the latest features, Shuttle just couldn’t resist bringing out a XPC based on this chipset. Today we are fortunate enough to get a look at the XPC SN41G2.
