Shuttle has made the new KPC available. It's actually a small case the I wold consider, along with the gPC mini. The big advantage of the KPC is the price and the PCI slot. I'll sacrifice some size to get a bit of PCIe goodness, but the $199 price tag hits the right button. Considering how cheap DDR2 RAM is you can ugrade for very little. It's only a 1.8GHz Celeron, but that's plenty for light duty uses in almost any case. Of course the GMA950 graphics aren't the snappiest, though for the price it's bearable. Given the choice fo building up my own machine of going for this with a few small upgrades (RAM) I'd take this. In general I never gave Shuttle much thought as they were always priced way above my range, and they were never (really) that small (footprint-wise).
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Cool.
When the eeepc was released, I came across the phrase "race for the bottom" in reference to manufacturers looking outside of the traditional MHz marketing the industry grew up on.
It'll be interesting to see how this trend affects the mini.
I use an older Socket 478-based Shuttle as a second desktop at work, and I'm pretty impressed with their design and build quality. I don't think I'd be interested in the KPC as a desktop, but if it supports onboard RAID it would work quite nicely as a home server.
Rats. I was *this* close to digging out my credit card until a look at the tech specs revealed it only has VGA output. Feh! Feh, feh, feh. I could live with Intel 950 video, but a DVI port is non-negotiable. (This was pretty much exactly what I've been looking for in a "TV Computer". )
Really, that's just plain stupid. (It's the sort of stupid and arbitrary feature omission that's so blatant that I'm wondering if the machine actually has an Apple logo under the Shuttle sticker.) The chipset supports DVI natively. They could of put the right port on it and tossed a dongle in the box, for crying out loud....
--Peace
It has a PCI slot, you could throw a video card in there. Or were you planning on using the slot for something else?
PCI video card are teh suck. And it's a waste of a perfectly good TV tuner slot.
--Peace
Of course they are. But for a media center PC they're more than adequate.
But that's the point, really. The onboard Intel 950 would be "adequate" if they hadn't crippled it with a VGA analog port. It's just dumb. Anything better then the very bottom-of the-barrel monitors offer DVI ports now, and of course since essentially all computer monitors now are LCDs there's the basic absurdity in taking a perfectly good digital signal, converting it to messy analog, and then converting it *back* to digital on the other end. A DVI port + analog dongle makes everything hunky-dory for everyone and might cost an extra buck or two at most to manufacture.
My other problem with PCI video cards is I've had specific problems in Linux with getting a PCI video card to work properly in a system equipped with Intel onboard graphics. Admittedly this was with an Intel 845G, not a 945+950, but it's still likely to be another hoop to jump through. (the system would get all confused by a "phantom" AGP device even if the onboard video was disabled and try enabling the AGPGART module, with generally troublesome results.) It was a "fixable" problem, but annoying. And again, you're still sucking up the one and only expansion slot. For a media center PC two obvious other candidates for that slot are a TV tuner or a Firewire card. Both no longer options for this system. I guess you can have a USB tuner, but then you no longer have an integrated box.
Anyway. I'm sure this computer would make someone happy. It's just dumb they disqualified it for one of its most obvious applications.
--Peace