Shuttle's $200 Linux box revealed

SHUTTLE IS DOING some very nice boxes, and its CES showings were proof of that. The prototypes shown off at Computex were now working models, and more importantly, they contaioned some amazing surprises.

Here you see the high-end of the line, the SDXI 2 or 3, the final name is up in the air. There is an air cooled one in back, and a liquid cooled monster in front. Both have a very nice flame finish, and the liquid cooled box has a hump on top to vent the heat.

They are X38 boxes with a 450W PSU, and can be outfitted all the way up to a Blu-Ray drive, Intel quad core CPU, and an NV 8800GTX. Both the CPU and GPU are liquid cooled. For those who still think that gaming laptops are not a complete joke, this thing just obsoleted your expensive ego trip. Ha ha.

This next one is the Shuttle SD30, a 16 input video camera workstation in a shoebox. It runs RapidOS, a custom distro based on Fedora 7, and has full hardware support for all video streams. It will be sold as a complete system or as a standalone capture box in January.

This is an amazing deal, and to top it off, it is all open source. You get everything, including the OS for abut $3-500 more than a comparable Shuttle box, or you can just buy the card. The four streams they had running at CES worked flawlessly, and a few more wouldn't make this box break a sweat.

Next up we have a new chassis called the SH7, it is a replacement for the venerable G5. The G5 isn't going to die soon, but this will replace it in time. The SH7 is a little bigger in every dimension than the G5, and sports two PCIe slots. There will be an ATI Spider based AS78SH3 and an NV based SN78SH7.

Remember that $200 Linux PC we told you about last week? It is called the KPC, and is indeed going to sell for $199. It is fairly barebones, coming with a Celeron 400, 512M of DDR2, a 60 or 80G HD and an Intel GMA945GC based board. This config may make you sneer, it would run XP like a dog, and Vista like a crippled dog, but Ubuntu should work very nicely thank you. For a laugh, it will support both XP and MeII. I want one.

It will also be sold as a barebones for only $99, you can make one heck of a kiosk or kitchen PC with this. The faceplate is removable and you can print your own and jazz up the KPC. Look for it in early March.

There were also two concepts at Shuttle, a 22-inch prototype monitor with a hard tempered glass face, but it lacked the handle of the old one. That is said to be coming before the final release.

Further out was a home theatre PC called the YouPC, and it was a real concept. No pictures were allowed, but it was a cube about 8-10 inches on a side. The front was a 7-inch touch panel for media player functionality, but the output would be directed to a real monitor. The top had a printer docking station and it was all wrapped around a mini-ITX mobo. It has possibilities.

We left the Shuttle suite with a lot of hope. Their new boxes look very nice, they have things from a price point no major manufacturer has matched to high end gaming rigs. Their Linux offerings give us hope, and the video box was a welcome surprise. Well done guys. µ