Shuttle’s Tiny PC

With my house becoming increasingly cluttered these days, space conservation is a big concern with me. This goes for everything, including my beloved computers and gadgets that unfortunately take up a lot of room. Each one of my computers has its own purpose, the Mac for work, the PC for gaming, and the others, well, various things. On the gaming side, it’s mandatory for me to use a PC. Since I’m trying to have a space-efficient desk, for the past several years I’ve been using Shuttle PCs. Shuttles are known for being a fairly compact sized cube. But soon Shuttle is launching a PC that will be no doubt one of the smallest PCs around.

Measuring in at eight inches long, 11 inches long and two inches tall, the Shuttle XPC X100 Ultra-Small Media PC is so tiny that it looks like a typical external FireWire drive. In this case, looks are deceiving. Inside the X100 is a full-scale computer powered by a 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo mobile processor. It has an ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 128MB graphics chip, a 250GB hard drive, 512MB of DDR2 (Double Data Rate 2) memory, a 16x-speed DVD ReWriter, multi-format card reader, and it’s home theater-ready with DVI or S-Video outputs. Additionally, its connections include Gigabit Ethernet, triple-band WiFi, FireWire, four USB 2.0 ports and it will be able to read most of your memory cards for easy photo/video synchronizing.

Since it’s only a couple inches longer than and has the same processor as Apple’s Mac mini, it will give Apple a good run for the money. What I always enjoy about Shuttle machines is the fact that you can either purchase the units fully ready-to-go or a barebones chassis. As you might guess, I prefer to buy them the barebones way. I have so much fun getting all the components together and putting together my own machine piece by piece. Because of its size, I’m not sure I can do that with the X100, but when it finally hits the market, I’ll be all over it. The X100 could very well be my next PC.

For you hardcore folks, Shuttle will also offer the X100 with up to 2GB of DDR2 memory and a 400 GB hard drive. Also ATI will announce a faster graphics chip, the X1800, that will be included in future Shuttle XPC X100 series machines. As far as I know, there are silver-gray and dark-gray case colors available. The X100 series is expected to sell for around $1,000 and while there is no official word on when you can purchase it, it’s expected be on the market around June. Keep your eyes on Shuttle’s website for updates and more information: www.shuttle.com.