Shuttle XPC Nforce 2 41G

SHUTTLE WILL always be known as the firm that created a revolution, despite the lack of a Che Guevara of its own.

The revolution - pushed with our own Cameron (also known as the 10 000th article at the INQUIRER) - started with its XPC - small form factor PCs which have become extremely popular over the past two years. From the time Shuttle started this revolution, things just got better for this motherboard vendor and they sure did great job in improving every single generation from the time they first introduced them.

The machine that we had in our hands for quite some time and which actually works as one of the PCs in our Viennese lab is the Shuttle XPC Nforce 2 41G.

This machine is based on the Nforce 2 IGP Nvidia chipset which supports up to DDR 333 and has some decent graphics and audio in the chipset. Paper box that hide these units comes very nicely designed and, in our case, we got one of the carrying cases - a really nice feature that helps you carry your much smaller-than-regular Shuttle XPC.

Shuttle pretty much set the standard where they have a Micro ATX board that features an AGP and a PCI slot, two not-so-easy-to-access memory modules - since this chipset operates better in dual memory mode - and space for hard drive, floppy or memory drive and of course DVD or CD.

The whole case is quality designed and there are no sharp edges that you can cut yourself on while assembling. Compared to new Epox Mini ME it's much easier to get a DVD and HDD inside, and it will take you just roughly half and hour to put your CPU, Memory drives and to mount Shuttle's well-known heat pipe cooler.

All the plugs that you need are supplied and this unit features two display outs which comes handy, funnily enough, if you have two displays. At the back they have 4 USBs sound card, LAN and serial port while at the front you'll find SPDIF, microphone and headset out, two more USBs and FireWire and, of course, two buttons for power and reset and two nicely glowing lights.

The machine works like a standard PC with DVD functionality and we used it for normal office business, music listening, movie watching and even for playing games although any serious game will need more power than the Nforce 2 graphics can provide.

This unit is capable of handling all CPUs with up to FSB 333 but we've never tried FSB 400 CPUs since we've never had one. This chipset does not officially have support for FSB 400 but we heard it should be able to handle it. An Athlon 3000+ was ticked along nicely at 2200 MHz exactly.

This machine does not have any fancy displays but we know the Athlon didn't get too hot in it. One thing that I have to note is that CPU cooler has a few different speeds of rotation and if you work something that will warm up your CPU, the rotations per minute ups and with RPM the noise will increase also. This is very efficient from a cooling point of view but I found it disturbing that when watching a movie the cooler suddenly starts to rotate faster and so gets noisier as well. If the noise is necessary - and it sure is with up to 100 W heat dissipation from normal PCs - I would prefer to adapt to a constant noise level than these jumps from very quiet to quite noisy.

We would like it little bit more quiet but its still far, far quieter then Mike's rig at INQUIRER central, hidden in depths of Harrow, London, UK, European Union, Planet Earth.

I had one issue where I could not connect a parallel printer since Shuttle's XPC lacks the port, but as an old hack I solved this problem with an Epox Bluetooth module. In the era where USB printers are standard from loves end, this does not seem such an issue. In any case, the printer port is available from Shuttle as an option.

We understand that the next generation, like the one with Nforce 3 that Shuttle just introduced, will feature a quieter cooling solution.

We tried to plug in both ATI and Nvidia's high-end cards into the system and both were working trouble free.

Test
We used Corsair XMS 3200 memory 2x256 MB, Toshiba CD Rom, Maxtor's 40 GB, 2 MB cache drive in Shuttle XPC. I decided not to do any graphics with this review simply as I don't have anything to compare it with. I can only say that it performs like any Nforce 2 IGP desktop board at least at very close level.

For our office work, movies, music and everything that we do in our normal time this machine is all you'll ever need.

Conclusion
When we met one of the Shuttle's directors in sunny Cannes he showed us a presentation and I could not stop laughing when I got to the page in the presentation where Shuttle claimed that their XPC has great WAF. My immediate question was, what the hell is WAF? Well, that stands for Wife Approval Factor. They sure did this one right.

My girlfriend simply said that she really likes this machine. Not a single female that saw that machine said differently and many males friends who saw it said it's a very nice design. I can add that it is very well designed, it does not take up much space on your table and it has all connectors you need and looks good to boot.

I sure know that the Shuttle's GAF - Girlfriend Approval Factor - is the highest possible and I could easily see this machine in my living room, I would just want it little bit less noisy for my home server which has to work 24 / 7 but, as we said, Shuttle will focus on this in the future, we are sure.

Shuttle did a nice job one more time. And since they invented the market it would be a shame if they didn't. µ