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| Shuttle SB61G2 "Spring(dale)-Loaded" | ||
| (Review by MS, May 27, 2003) |
Summary
This time, Shuttle did not waste any time to follow up on the release of Intel's Springdale platform and pushed out an SFF system based on the i865G chipset for "Dual channel DDR - P4 pleasure coming to an XPC near you". Some of the collateral Springdale features like CSA and SoundMAX4 have been omitted in favor of the established ALC650 CODEC and the RealTek RTL8100B network controller but that does not diminish the overall impression that the SB61G2 is the most powerful XPC ever.
We put the little box through the paces, pitting it against competitors as formidable as Intel's own Canterwood board and, who would have guessed the overall winner? Well, we won't jump ahead of ourselves here..
One form factor that does not need any further introduction is the Shuttle XPC. Often copied, never matched by the various competitors such as Soltek or Iwill, the XPC line of Shuttle has become the major revenue stream for Shuttle Computers, one of the few companies who are actually doing quite well in the slump economy of today.
The worst mistake any companies can make is to sit on their laurels and contemplate past success. It is nice to have a great pedigree but time is not standing still, new technologies emerge almost daily and there is hardly anything that describes the IT rat-race better than the Red Queen paradigm: You have to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are.
The SB61G2 follows the tradition of earlier XPCs but brings a wealth of new technology to the table. Distinguishing feature as compared to the SN41G2 is the small firewire connector in the front panel
Lately, there was not much of a race in the XPC world, chipsets were established entities and the particular prerequisites needed for an XPC, especially the presence of integrated graphics, excluded the use of e.g. Intel's Granite Bay or Canterwood chipset. There would have been the option of adding additional graphics on a custom board using, for example, dual channel Rambus or any other exotic technology just in order to satisfy the novelty factor. However, chasing every single opportunity only leads to waste of R&D resources and inventory fragmentation further down the road.
The second revision of the nForce2 chipset with its 400 MHz bus interface at least warranted a new model name, that is the SN45G as opposed to the earlier SN41G2 but the differences here are marginal. What was really needed was a novel Intel platform, shedding the fetters of single channel DDR technology and offering the next evolutionary step in the permanent revolution of Intel's eXreme Graphics. Needless to say that SATA is a perfect match for the XPC, there is hardly any form factor that would benefit more from just the CabCon (cable and connector) redesign than the XPC as we already showed in our XPC SATA-RAID article. Can you say Springdale? It is somewhat easier to pronounce than SB61G2 but in the XPC world, the two are synonymous for each other.
The past has alwasy seen a minor lag between the release of a new chipset and its implementation into an XPC. With the SB61G2, the execution or turnaround time is non-existent, we had the SB61G2 already before the Springdale embargo lifted.
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