I simply adore our new Shuttle XPC. Its complement of industry-standard hardware makes sure that it's well supported for all the distros we've tried on it (Slackware, SuSE 9.0 Pro, SuSE/Novell 9.1 eval).

As a bare-bones kit you will need to add your choice of S478 CPU, RAM, and HDD.

When I first saw this form factor back in 2002, I was shopping for Micro-ITX boards and cases. I didn't really see the benefit of having a box that takes up a little bit less real estate on my desktop than a 'traditional' beige-box 17 inch tower. After a few months of using it with a Pentium 4HT 3.06GHz CPU, I can testify that it's a much nicer workmate than a big beige/black/neon monolith, and a heck of a lot quieter. Integrated fron-panel I/O consists of two USB-2.0 ports and one IEEE-1394 full-size socket. (It appears that the newer XPC boxes are being fitted with "mini" firewire.)

The Shuttle XPC line of "bare-bones" cases present a face of about 8" on a side and about a foot deep. Removable acrylic faces are the norm, but more XPC models are going for the clean look of hidden drive bays and fron panel I/O connectors. The well-tooled aluminum chassis is readily accesible with chromed thumb screws at the rear and a cowling that fits the frame perfectly. Things can get a bit snug working inside the case, but there are plenty of clips and stick'ems to assist in some rudimentary cable management. There is a parking spot for a single 3.5" internal drive and finished front plates can be removed to insert external 3.5" and 5.25" external devices. We went with a CD-R/DVD combo and a 7-in-1 USB memory card reader.

The really big to-do with the Shuttle combos is their unique cooling system which uses a CPU heatsink perforated with sealed double-walled heat pipes which are plumbed to the very back of the box, where they terminate in a radiator styled matrix (complete with a variable-speed quiet fan). As the mystery liquid is vaporized on the heatsink it is displaced by cooler, denser liquid which has condensed at the rear cooling fan. The warmer and less dense vapour travels up the pipe where it is cooled by the fan and fin arrangement. This rear fan and the small (40MM) fan on the very small PSU are the only moving parts here and it does a pretty good job of keeping quiet. A good kernel building workout on a warm summer day was enough to trigger the factory-set threshold of 60 degrees C at the CPU to spin the fan up over the 2400RPM rate to keep things cool. The fan throttling feature can be changed by the user in the BIOS, and apparently via ACPI (haven't tried that yet). On that note; we were able to get lm_sensors up and running from vanilla source with a 2.6 series kernel and all sensor data was available.

This is a nice, quiet box that gets lots of compliments for looks and anybody who has taken it for a test drive has been suitably impressed by its speed and low ambient noise. You will pay a bit more for a Shuttle XPC than a generic beige-box, but you do get a good-looking, quiet package that's easy to live and work with. If you're looking for a lot of expansion slots then the XPC series is probably not for you. There is room for one AGP card and one 32bit PCI card.