|
|
|
XPC Small Form Factor
Barebone Computers
What is XPC and Small Form Factor?
Small Form Factor (or
SFF) PC’s are becoming more and more popular and beginning to displace the
major end users desktop. These PC’s are relatively extremely small, taking
up about as much space as a Laptop PC. While being small they are also very
powerful, even to the point that they are equaling full sized desktop’s and
in some cases surpassing their computing power.
Shuttle first introduced the commercially available SFF based
PC, dubbed the Shuttle XPC
line with the SV25 model as the base. Designed for the AMD Athlon and Duron
CPUs, VIA’s KN133 chipset was used to power the system with onboard Savage
XP graphics, the performance was less than stellar, but launched Shuttle
into the exciting SFF market.
  
MSI Mega Barebone System
$299.00 |
|
| |
Shuttle XPC biggest
seller that really pushed them to the max was the Intel Pentium 4 based XPC with the SiS 650 chipset being chosen over
the P4M266 due to its support for DDR-333 memory; the SS50C was launched,
and was the very first XPC to support a AGP slot. This allowed for a much
more powerful video controller to be added, in this, Shuttle gained the
enthusiast market; the SV40G was quickly launched with the SiS 740 chipset
and AGP slot to gain the AMD Athlon supporters.
The launch of the nForce2 IGP chipset saw the hardware
community up in support for a Shuttle XPC based on this chipset and it
wasn’t long after the we saw the Shuttle SN14G2 XPC. This PC was well above
all the norms. The nForce2 Ultra series gave Shuttle a new evolutionary move
on the XPC to support the 400Mhz FSB XP CPU’s
SFF computers have a very small footprint compared to most
desktop systems yet provide ample computing power for most users. Barebone
XCP systems are affordable but a little more difficult to upgrade and work
on because unused space is a premium.
You can find good
deals on barebone XCP and other name brand SFF systems here.
|
|
