SUMMARY: Coming of age in the past 12 months or so is the Small Form Factor evolution. Shuttle were the true innovator of this exciting new small computer market and today Cameron "Sov" Johnson takes a look at Shuttle's SN45G XPC which is based on nVidia's nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset. How does it compare to a full-sized desktop system? Read on and find out just how much of a punch this small little thing can pack!
It is without a doubt that Small Form Factor (or SFF as it can be referred to as) PC’s are taking on a life of their own, and even to this date, starting to displace the major end users desktop. These PC’s are for one extremely small, taking up about as much space as a Laptop PC. While being small they are extremely powerful, even to the point that they are equaling full sized desktop’s and even taking them out of the picture all together in certain cases. We can see the evolution starting with Shuttle with the XPC and VIA’s approach with the EPIA motherboard for D.I.Y SFF hobbyists, while the VIA solutions are not aimed at high end gamers, Shuttle are.
Shuttle first introduced the commercially available SFF based PC, dubbed the XPC line with the SV25 model as the base. Designed for the 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 exciting SFF market.
Shuttle’s biggest seller that really pushed them to the max was the Intel Pentium 4 based XPC with the SiS 650 chipset being chosen over the P4M266 due to its support for DDR-333 memory; the SS50C was launched, and was the very first XPC to support a AGP slot. This allowed for a much more powerful video controller to be added, in this, Shuttle gained the enthusiast market; the SV40G was quickly launched with the SiS 740 chipset and AGP slot to gain the AMD Athlon supporters.
The launch of the nForce2 IGP chipset saw the hardware community up in support for a Shuttle XPC based on this chipset and it wasn’t long after the we saw the Shuttle SN14G2 XPC. This PC was well above all the norms. The nForce2 Ultra series gave Shuttle a new evolutionary move on the XPC to support the 400Mhz FSB XP CPU’s
Today we take a look at the Shuttle SN45G nForce2 Ultra based XPC and see how it compares to the bigger desktop variety nForce2 based system.
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