Shuttle PCs

blammo

Hi was just wondering what the general pros and cons of Shuttle PCs were. As I understand it they are smaller than a regular desktop pc tend to be used as a media centre pc.

thanks

kwikbreaks

Essentially a powerful PC in a small form factor. They tend to offer poor bang per buck as they need fancy heat pipe cooling which adds to the cost. Most are a long way from being silent too so imo wouldn't make good media centres.

They are pretty niche products and I'd say you need a well defined reason for chosing one over the alternatives.

fwor

I have two at the moment.

Good points: Very compact, very well made and laid out inside, visibly (IMO) quite attractive.

Not so good: The entry level models are not so well laid out in terms of cooling. The more high-end ones can be a bit noisy because they have several fans (the larger of mine has 5 or 6!).

They are also relatively expensive, but that's partly because most have an aluminium chassis.

If you're going for a processor or GPU that generates a lot of heat, try to go for a P-series design, as it has separate cooling for the drive bays. If you want to use it only as a media centre you would probably prefer one with an external "brick" PSU, as that means one less droning fan to worry about.

blammo

I was thinking in terms of a media centre PC but had been wondering how a shuttle PC might stack up against a nettop.

Marty_J

blammo wrote: »

I was thinking in terms of a media centre PC but had been wondering how a shuttle PC might stack up against a nettop.

Have a look at the Mac Mini. They're really small and virtually silent.

RobertoMoir

a Shuttle type PC would blow away a nettop. Of course if you don't need the power compared to a nettop then its money wasted isn't it?

My preferred "shuttle-type" PC is the Mac Mini. Especially for media centres. You can even run Windows on it to use their media centre software if that is what you prefer. It looks right smart in the front room as a media centre, it's about the quietest machine in its class and it can do what most people need from it in the front room.

Not the cheapest perhaps but as a lot of shuttle type machines are "build your own" then unless you have some of the parts laying around spare or you're building a "low spec" machine then there will be far less difference than you might think.

ventureuk

I have a six year old Shuttle XPC running a 3ghz hyperthreading P4, a gig of memory, a nice ATi graphics card, two HDDs and Windows 7. It is silent, the fan can be finely adjusted in the BIOS to only trigger at certain temps, it has been solidly reliable, upgraded a couple of times, has run XP, Ubuntu, Win 7 and various dual boot variations. The heat pipe cooler is excellent and tbh I'm almost wishing it would give up so I can justify a new Shuttle.

Well worth the investment of a little extra money for a quality product in this case.

RobertoMoir

I think the actual shuttles are better than some of the clone brands, that's for sure. I built one quite a few years ago... can't remember the model but it was a shuttle model designed specifically for media centre use... and it was very good indeed. Back when I used to do bits and pieces with the borg I had builds of "Longhorn" on there just fine, had builds of Open Darwin, all sorts of things and it lapped them all up.

I'm a convert to Mac Minis for that job now like I said, but if I was building a PC for the job it would be a proper shuttle case.

blammo

thanks for the info. I'm looking for something which would basically work as a PVR, playing blu-rays and other HD content, and storing photos and home videos for showing the folks when they come round. Some of the nettops I've looked at would be ok for this and are relatively inexpensive, I was just pretty unfamiliar with shuttle PCs so was looking for some advice.

Are there any shuttle models which would be recommended?

turbobob

Not sure of models specifically but for 1080p use I would take care to choose one with a more powerful integrated graphics chipset. The better ones take a lot of the load off the CPU, which means smoother video output with 1080p. Alternatively you could use a dedicated graphics card (a fairly cheap one like an ATI HD 4550 would do).

For example something like this would be fine if you wanted to use a Core 2 processor - http://uk.shuttle.com/product_detail.jsp?PLLI=851&PI=1131 The integrated graphics on this are good enough for HD. This test shows performance of various integrated graphics processors in Blu Ray. Avoid the G31/G33 based Shuttles (unless you intend to use a graphics card).