Byte-sized: Retro Shuttle XPC Small form-factor PC
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- čas přidán 18. 04. 2024
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Thank you so much!
Here's one you don't see too often. A Shuttle XPC small form-factor PC, based on a FlexATX motherboard. Their claim of space-savings might be dubious, but they sure are an interesting bit of oddware.
GUYS MIKETECH JUST UPLOADED
Yayyyyyyyyyyyy !
I know right!
Omg he did????!?!?
@@kaboommusicmixer8149 yup
@@kaboommusicmixer8149 yup
"Is it about my cube?" - Mr. Burns
You have 30 minutes to move your cube!
you have 10 minutes to move your car
Dude those guns. Please do a video on an ARM based computer and call it “I never skip ARM day” - you’ll win CZcams
These computers were marketed as tiny gaming machines. I had a few of these back in the day, loved them for lan parties. Also, the look of the HDD makes me think they got it second hand probably, trying to get a deal, did a fresh install of everything but found that it couldn't do anything in 2012. Also, the build quality of these machines was legendary, all of the ones I had are still working in a friend's retro collection. The white backing was marketed as a way to print pics (it templates) and you could put your company logos, your favorite game, etc. The psu is a flexatx, a 1U with no edge connector. What's best of those is you can swap in any ITX board, and if you can find one, an 80mm AIO cooler made for SFF systems, and keep it going even today. Always loved Shuttle, the BMW of mini pcs, before everyone was making a minipc. Hipster minis, if you will. Or won't, I already said it. Too late. ;)
😄😄"No banana for scale needed here!" - Nice Linus reference! Love it!
I think I watch these more for the Mike one-liners than the PC breakdowns. 🤣
amazing that all the caps on the motherboard were intact, they're from the notorious capacitor plague era.
With the time flying by, I've noted that the plague was like the Red Ring of Death for the XboX 360 : either you could be really lucky and never see even one red ring in your whole life, either you were screwed right from the start 😂 This is one of these stupid things that are only a matter of luck or not. 😂
Not exactly, pretty much every RROD era Xbox is guaranteed to fail the way the GPU is packaged will fail and the only fix is replacement, but with the capacitor plague every motherboard produced during the capacitor plague used bad caps plenty of boards may have polymer or high quality electrolytics that are still good.
They don't appear to be Rubycons (those have the distinctive K-shaped seam pattern on top), but I'm guessing Shuttle only used top-tier caps from someone else. The plague caps were cheap flawed knockoffs of Rubycons from China and Hong Kong; Dell was a notorious heavy user of them.
Shuttle was famous for using 100% quality Japanese caps, which for some reason seem to last much, much longer than Chinese caps of the era. Probably made of ceramic, instead of plastic.
Yeah. Of all the AGP era systems I have revitalised over the last year, only one had working capacitors - I still replaced them.
I loved my little Shuttle XPC I had back around 2007/2008. Thankfully I still have an old email (since Newegg orders don't go back before 2018 for me)... it was a Shuttle XPC SS56L with a Shuttle FS56 motherboard, and according to the email I was apparently running FreeBSD on it at the time lol. Memories!
Those shuttle cases were actually very good quality. My buddy had one tricked out with a quad core e6600, 32gb ram, gpu, etc. He ran all kinds of music making programs and gamed on it. I was always jealous of how fast and small it was.
Quad core E66 and 32 GB RAM ? Omg, this lucky bastard... 🤤🤤
@@fridaycaliforniaa23632 gb of RAM 15-16 years ago! That was only to be found in servers and very expensive and professional workstations. Definitely not inside a small consumer case like this.
Was only thinking about your channel today Mike - _"Think and ye shall receive!"_ That was the cutest Mini PC, so cool. Great vid bud, stay well.
When Mike doesn't post a new video, I'm waiting alone in my room, like a drug addict waiting for his daily dose of powder 😂
a new mike tech video. its a good way to start the week end 🙂
I can't agree more =)
New MikeTech video!!!!
So those machines were sold as "bare bones" to OEMs to build up. They just added the CPU, RAM, Storage and optical drives. I owned my own company at the time, and we built and sold tons of those Shuttles, in a large number of variations. Small businesses loved them, since they took up so little space and were very quite. I don't think we ever sold a blue one like that though. Great little machines, easy to put together too.
I remember at the time you used to be able to buy new face places for these, they were really popular as home theatre PCs.
I remember these very well because I was working on building one in one of my first IT jobs and without noticing I had it plugged in and turned on at the wall accidentally touched the power supply due to the space constraints...that woke me up :) (luckily the circuit breakers kicked in pretty quickly!) I do seem to remember they ran quite hot and as a result loud though
Now... THAT is cute ....... and the Shuttle PC isn't so bad either 😁
I love your videos, Mike! Thanks for sharing, and I hope you continue!
I still have two Shuttle boxes in regular use, and another that gets occasional specialty use for Win 7-era programs. I built a work/play PC out of a box like that one for my niece as she headed off to college. Even put a TV tuner/capture card in it.
The area (and panel) below the optical drive was made to accommodate a 3.5-inch floppy drive. In most cases, (by the time these boxes were released) the slot was filled with multi-function units, usually housing flash card readers, additional USB ports, or audio I/O, in addition to the floppy drive ...
I love your vids look forward to them i just wish there was more. Cheers mate
Oh rad!
1. I really wanted one of these back in the day.
2. The PSU was made on my birthday.
I sold many different Shuttle systems in the days. They implimented all sort of chipsets. You could buy an upgraded PSU and a carry bag. The idea was to make it a portable workstation / gaming pc. They weren't that expensive compared to a laptop and came barebone from the factory with just the radiator cooling installed. The cooling, when correctly installed, was really effective and quiet.
Glad to see you back with a video. That small PC sure is interesting and seems to be of high uality too. Thanks for sharing.
I remember wanting one of those back in the day! I loved that case style! Awesome vid as always!
The Shuttle PCs are beautiful. Got a few of them in the late 90s. Ahead of their time.
Always wanted one of these back in the day! Cool video, Mike, thanks!
Thank you for this fine video!
Nice retro PC video!😊
Nice.
Thank you.
I like this little form factor. It’s as big as it needs to be to put the necessities of the era (including an agp graphics card), looks well built, and the cpu cooler is pretty smart.
Just noticed one of your patron’s names is “HarryJohnson’sHappyTrail” hehehehehe it’s not me, but it gave me a giggle.
Oh what a blast. I had one of these. With a... XP1800+ and 4200ti if memory serves. Should still be in a wardrobe somewhere, I think...
I got one and it’s my Win98/XP retro computer.
I always loved the shuttle cases
I had one of these back in the day. I definitely overloaded the little power supply with an AGP graphics card. It made my lights flicker in my bedroom haha.
I love those little things now, they were the bane of my existence when I was a tech.
Wow that's some teeny tiny tower tech!
That's an interesting video on an interesting machine, I ilke it! I too was surprised that it had 98 on it instead of XP, because of the XP-era date codes throughout
The Shuttle was one of the first very compact cube PCs designed for carrying to LAN parties, where you could play on an actual desktop PC instead of a laptop. Falcon Northwest came out with their competing Fragbox. I remember reviews of these showing up in Computer Gaming World.
I own a Shuttle myself, mines a Shuttle XPC SN41G2, and it was my First Desktop PC as an upgrade to my (now gone) Emate 300.
I still have it today and she still works granted i think it could do with a nice rebuild
I've been using a Shuttle XPC SN41G2v2 for a decade now as my Windows 98 computer. I move a lot so the ability to have a system that will house a AMD Athlon XP 3200+, 512MB of PC3200 DDR, a Geforce4 Ti 4800 and a good, Sound Blaster Audigy for old games on real hardware the size of a shoe box is great! As long as you plan ahead they are pretty great compact systems and I would absolutely recommend them.
I also have one of these, but mine shipped with XP. Still working perfectly with all the original hardware.
I got it for $9.99 from a thrift store with the intent to build my mini ITX system in it, but the Z390i board didn't fit the case.
Instead, I reassembled it to use as a dedicated XP box, and lucked out with a Fractal Design Core 500 case for $6.99 about a month later.
It's a bit too old to run anything other than the older games and programs that wont work in Windows 10, but it is a neat little conversation piece for sure.
I had an AMD XP 2200 one of these with a fanless (custom zalman) ATI All-In-Wonder card. The graphics cards fins met the intake holes on the sides of the case, so it worked out perfectly. And I loved the heatpipe exhaust system. The only thing that kept the machine from being perfect was the loud power supply and exhaust fan. If I have time this summer, I’m going to build my silent SFF system with an AMD G series chip. It would probably take up the space of the 5 1/2 optical drive of the Shuttle XPC, and it wwould be the 20th anniversary edition of my original Shuttle XPC.
I’ve seen a few other tech CZcamsrs messing around with different shuttle systems. I love their commitment to their form factor lol
The modern shuttle stuff is as dull as they get last I looked. They do still seem to have the cube but it only comes in black but it definitely has some nods to this older style. Looks like it can maybe even accept a laptop optical drive. It does look kinda dull and featureless in general though. Lacks the character of this old one.
@@Aeduo agreed. But they really committed to the form factor and cooler style lol
Yay you are back :)
Such mastery of mysteries! What a beauty
Out of curiosity, how is your comment 11 hours old when the video shows me it was uploaded 7 hours ago?
@@KryptonianAI He uploads the video unlisted for patrons first.
@@KryptonianAIpatreon. Cheers
@@ForTheBirbs Thanks!
I had one of these! Sold it off to a friend recently. Had it beefed up with a healthy amount of RAM, an nVidia 6800 GT, and a nice P4 dropped in place of the Celeron I found it with. Thing was loud as hell but my god was it a killer little XP machine. Got a little toasty with the GPU expectedly, but that cooler did a mighty fine job of cooling the P4 on its own surprisingly, despite being in such a small case. I kinda miss my "P4 Cube" haha
wow - very amazing!
oooh yay new video ❤
This pc looks so good.
I will always adore adorable mini computers! It just goes to show how much better we are at making things smaller! A NUC is a marvel of engineering!
Greets again, MikeTech!
I think it's a better cube than Apple ever came up with. : )
1:24 they clearly missed the *opportunity* (pun intended) to give it the S/N « STS-51-G » and rename this example the *Discovery* shuttle 😁
very interesting PC for its time
I did a ITX build with one of these.... the chassis was given to me.... absolutely cool chassis.... gave the system as a gift.... I'm glad it was just the chassis because I hate the P4 ITX Boards....shuttle still makes these units, but they are expensive!
I’ve got a couple of XPC’s I’ve been playing with over the last few weeks. An AthlonXP based one and a later Core 2 Duo one.
I absolutely love these little beats. Back in my LAN part days these were *the* machines to have. For AMD based ones they even produced some nForce machines which screamed.
Just be aware that the PSUs are a known weak point.
Glad you are Back Mike 👍🏻 Looks like On-Call might be getting in the way 🙄 Had a couple of these machines back in the day. AMD Athlon and Intel Core 2 Quad. Last one I had was an Intel Core i7 Gen 1. Only issues with these were the PSU’s being a little on the less powered side and also failing 😳 That PSU is not original to the system, as the original ones had Shuttle branding @ 80watts or a whopping 130watts. The systems were sold as Bare chassis systems, so the CD drive and possibly the Floppy drive wouldn’t have been provided. Cheers 🍻
I had several different Shuttle XPC's over the years, including this specific model! Really nice if you modified them a little bit (cut out the rear fan grill to increase air flow, replace the shrouded rear exhaust fan that blows over the heat pipe). One time I had to use RTV silicone to stop the horrible coil whine coming from the motherboard components.
I was waiting for this exact model, as it was the first Shuttle XPC with an AGP slot. Wound up buying one of the first 200 barebones models made and got it days before attending QuakeCon 2002. Tossed in the CPU, GPU, RAM, HDD and CD-Rom drive and loaded up Windows 2000. Shuttle had a rep at the show and ATI had a red shuttle with the case open, showing off the Radeon 9700 Pro they were taking preorders for. Ultimately these got pretty popular with a few friends of mine, as we commonly were hosting small LAN parties and carpooling to the larger ones.
Reason I knew I had one of the first 200 is that the Shuttle rep let me know about a manufacturing issue, they were missing the punchout for the optional parallel port, and some vent holes on the underside front of the case. They didn't catch it till after the units shipped off to some online retailers. I ended up getting it replaced under RMA, as the RAM was running too hot and was leading to instability. Having friends with the same system but the later revision case helped confirm it was a contributing factor.
The Shuttle XPC line wound up being the last PCs I built before moving over to Apple hardware and gaming via Bootcamp. Great little machines, and mine lived out it's later years as a home theater PC.
Found the old news release from August 2022: web.archive.org/web/20020802162300/www.shuttle.com/english/ss51news.htm
These were all the rage in the early 2000s at LAN parties. I continued to build airy towers for customers. Then by the mid 2000s I was repairing these. Capacitor plague plus toaster ovens as we called them, no bueno.
I got such radiator from somewhere like 10-15 years ago for my LGA775 and use it since then. I like that it blows warm air straight overboard. It is running on the 4th CPU and third socket already, this time LGA1200.
Sony and Teac drives are my favorite. I always save them when I get a parts machine.
Wow that system is so damn cute! I want it. Watch out for that bulb you need sunscreen for it and eclipse glasses.😂 So great to start my morning out with a new video from you!
I wonder what you have in the works. Knowing you as I do, it going to be something great! Can’t wait to see it revealed. Looking forward to that video and to being amazed!
I built and sold many a PC in this case (we'd buy the barebones kits and then spec them out for the customer). Mostly to college students who wanted something more powerful than the laptops of the day, and LAN gamers who were tired of lugging their tanks around.
2:20 - Not that I recall. They were solidly built. (Note after watching the whole video - Looks like yours in an early version, so they may have had teething issues that were fixed before I started building them)
4:40 - We were late enough in the game that the MoBo had SATA on it.
6:06 - Very early (pre-standard) adoption of the 4-pin additional CPU power connecter, perhaps?
Tiny video for a tiny system. Flex ATX...
Surely it's not a coincidence those arms are bigger and veinier than ever. 😂😍
I Picked up a ShuttlePC SB75G2 from an eWaste place in Mich. P4 3.40E, The Side Air vents on mine are larger & popped out from the inside.
Mine is all Black, I've Cunt a Hole in the Top of the Shell for a 60cm Low-Profile Fan with a Fan Grill on the Top of the Case.
I need to Sand It, I think I'm going to. Paint it GameCube Purple: I Also want to Add 2 handles running along the Top on both sides.
When I had my First IT Job in Na$hville, I had a CompUSA business account... I Badly wanted to buy one of these back in 2k4/5.
I'm going to attempt a Full Retro Setup, MsDos & Win 3.x / WinXp & Linux 32-Bit, Something updated
I had a shuttle XPC many years ago, had a Core 2 Quad Q8300 with 4GBs of RAM! :) Added a GT 440 to it later on for some basic gaming.
amazing simspons references, i hooked it to my belt which was the style at the time
Interesting computer, Mike. Greetings from Poland . 🤔🤝👍
The parallel port above the fan shroud was as I remember an optional extra.
I remember when these came out originally. I remember stupidly scoffing at them for being so tiny and unwieldy... but now despite them definitely being tiny and unwieldy, I really wish I owned one. :( Oh well, maybe one day. Great restoration!
We're on opposite sides of the scale on that one. When I was working at the mom-and-pop computer store, I had to deal with these things. Customers wanted the small foot print, but I've ALWAYS been a mid to large tower user because of space to work on them. These cases, you need low power, low heat devices inside otherwise things bake themselves.
They're also a real pain in the arse when you've got a FULLY fledged out drive bay use going on. Horror to work on.
I GET it. I understand it. But, really really I avoid them like the plague. Not a fan here.
@@Mr76Pontiac I'm completely with you. I'm actually building a mini-ITX Win 98 P3 system in a mini-ITX case and OMG! So it's not that it's my favourite form factor but it is nice to have a small system to just whip out from time to time or when going to a LAN party or something. Or just for the collection as a curiousity or what have you.
But yeah, otherwise, it's tower or desktop all the way for me.
I had one of these many years ago.
The power supplies definitely were not the best.
You could actually run dual hard drives and retain the Floppy and CD-Rom Drives.
I used mine as a CCTV Server.
These 'Shuttle PCs' were cute fad for a time. Awesome though. I know SFF is a thing now too. Great video as always.
I built one of those back in 2004 or so. A promise raid controller and dual 37 (?)GB 10K drives, 3gigahertz pentium and 512 MB Ram.Very fast and worked great for several years until the PSU died. Thanks for the memories.
I still have a fully functional Shuttle PC. It's AMD AM3 based with a 6 core 1145T (IIRC). Still works great but somewhat slow these days. They were well designed in their day. I'm tempted to fit a modern ITX motherboard in there and use the case.
6:04 The molex connector was used before the ATX 12V plug was introduced.
This is a great video! Interesting that Windows 98 was installed on that, but I had this computer back in the day as my "portable" gaming computer, exact same color. An nVidia FX5600, with a Highpoint RAID card to give it SATA. Sold it when I got a laptop because I stopped gaming for a while.
this vas my first small itx build i had a intel celleron d 2,4ghz and a 9800 pro from ati nice computer i also buyed a bag for it i still have it
A bunch of us in the local retro group have Shuttles - they are awesome for Lan nights.
I had one of these cubes with a 3.0 p4 with hyper threading, it was a bear to keep cool.
Seeing Shuttle PCs in my area is very rare, but the last one I saw a few years back us quite similar to the one you shown in the video, but has a floppy drive. I think it was also P4 based or Athlon XP, very early 2000s era of PCs. I found it quite cute for how compact it is.
I used to have a bunch of these. Recently picked up a new one - a mostly mint p4 2.8 Prescott, 2gb ram, Radeon x700 agp, 1tb hdd. Loud machine but a good era appropriate xp box.
Haha man blast from the past - got 2 of them in me shed lol one nice silver one one sexy black one. 2 manufacturers that were pretty epic back in the day - Shuttle and Lian Li. Aah the good days when the most expensive case you could buy was like 130 odd :S
In the early 2000s I would've loved a computer like this with like an Athlon or fast pentium 3 and a radeon 9800 pro would've been my dream machine. I remember seeing in magazines people doing gaming builds in these little cases, and CPUs and GPUs hadn't gotten so far off the rails on power usage that a small formfactor case was doable. I imagine people used them for LAN parties and stuff.
It would've been quickly obsolete by later athlons and pentium 4s and nvidia geforce 4000, 5000, 6000 series within the next like 3 or so years, but it would've been cool for all of like 6 months haha. Then would've struggled to play things like half life 2 and portal and doom 3 and stalker.
Windows 98 in 2012 is kinda an odd one. Maybe someone was planning on it being a bridge system or something, or maybe trying to put together a somewhat usable retro gaming PC but maybe ran in to too many issues due to the hardware being too recent.
Shuttles! Loved them but they did tend to cook themselves when you ran SETI@Home
Wow, a Shuttle XPC from Taiwan! I've not seen one in over 20 years. What a survivor! This is so clean for the age.
Puts a whole new meaning to "what a small surprise!" 😅 Gotta love it! Keep 'em coming, hope to see more very soon, been waiting a bit for your next vids! Hope all is well, cheers! Also, as a sidenote, which SiS graphics chip is it? One of my Win98 machines had a SiS 6326 card built on the MoBo.
Ah, I have a black one of those with a mirrored front, running XP and all of my games (on a SSD of course, upgraded it to a Pentium 4 as it has the mother of all heatsinks, love it to bits. Cracking good machine that is a joy to work on. Mine has Sata connections so can only assume it is a later model as the fan, and heatsink on mine is all one unit. ps - Ah DDR1, thanks for the heads up, I have always wondered what type it is, now I can upgrade that as well, cheers.
You could get 3.5" audio tape drives and minidisk drives for that spare slot! Knew someone in the 000s' who had one in place of a pc and stereo! I still had my beige tower and vinyl
I owned a Shuttle SN41G2. It had an Athlon 2700XP cpu and a Radeon 9600. It was great for hauling to LAN parties. I kept it for several years as a workbench pc, then retired it because it was finicky with linux installs.
Even though I never used them, I noticed there were extra usb headers on the board. I could installed more usb jacks in the floppy slot.
In my shop we'd use those for putting in a memory card reader in the floppy bay.
I have this same system with a P4 Voodoo5 and Sound Blaster Audigy 2ZS. For some Windows 98SE gaming.
My roommate had an old Shuttle, over time (a few years) most of the caps went bad. And then never again Shuttle.
It's crazy how long Shuttle was using this same case layout. I have two of these systems, which are from 2011 and 2018, respectively, and they have the same layout.
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That's a weird computer, it looks like a first-generation Pentium 4. Those processors are a bit infamous but good to see running !! 🤜🤛
What a cute little system. Would have liked to use something like that with Win XP and Primiere 6 to edit video on back in 02.
I have a similar one, a silver Pentium 4. Just love it 😅
odd sff cube for that time...but i like it (and you cyute
I didn't know if SFF PC like on video, already existing in 2000s. The first time seeing this PC was when watched video from "Optimum Tech" 😅
This one can Upgrade the modern hardware :)
A "chip" off the old block! 😆