Introduction & Shuttle
As we all know in the last year or so SFF has kicked off with Shuttle moving from the SV24/5 to the AGP integration and other players coming on the scene.Nigel went to the CeBIT to catch up with companies he deals with in the course of running Ultim8pc. After he came back, he decided to write an article about what he saw.
Small Form Factor @ CeBit 2003
My visit to the CeBit was to get the low down on all the latest SFF gear. I would not be disappointed - there were lots of XPC 'wanna be's' & copies. Along with mini-iTX related stuff.
So here's what I found:
Shuttles stand
Here, I met up with my good friend Cameron Rodgers, Shuttles USA Marketing Manager. We spent around an hour talking about many interesting issues & new products. First up was the working 'prototype' SN42 for the upcoming AMD Opteron CPU:
As you can see, it's sort of based on the existing XPC's with a kind of row of buttons stuck on the top front fascia, along with a fold down opaque 'stealth' flap that covers the 5.25 & 3.5" drive bays. There's also another one that covers the front mounted USB/1394/sound ports. I personally didn't like the styling & Cameron said that he was not sure if this would be the styling for production models.
I talked to Cameron about who now manufactured their cases & he said that they would be branching out & using a few others manufacturers for some new ranges. One of these would be the legendary 'Soldam'. This is what he showed me:
For those who have ever seen the Soldam boxes, the paint finish is absolutely first class. The build quality also follows suit. The chassis itself weights in at almost twice that of the existing Shuttle XPC cases. A testament to the gauge of aluminum in use. It features a stealthed CD drive bay & fold down flap that covers the USB/1394/sound ports.
This was no 'mock-up' but a fully functioning unit, with an Intel 845G chipset based motherboard in there!
I mentioned that everyone likes the Soldam case with the mirror finish & the slot load CD/DVD drive bay - Cameron said that they will be doing other Soldam cased XPC's.....
We went upstairs & then Cameron showed me some new motherboards that will feature in upcoming Shuttle XPC's:
The new Intel 'Springdale' based board.
The new board for the upcoming AMD 'A64' CPU.
It was pointed out that these boards are ready for production!
Also on the stand were a couple of award winning 'modded' Shuttle's, including Mark Fosters all Black XPC with TFT panel built into the front & then this neatly & expertly carried out water cooled XPC - the CPU & graphics card GPU are water-cooled. Everything is very neatly fitted inside the case! You have got to hand it to those Germans...
Cameron had mentioned that they were teaming up with other Companies & he made a point of telling me to visit the ACorp stand.
