Monday, October 17, 2005
Shuttle Unveils the Ultimate Media Center XPC: The M1000
Posted by Jason Dunn in "HARDWARE" @ 09:30 AM
"The Shuttle XPC Media Center brings you to the forefront of home multimedia convergence. Say goodbye to your VCR, CD, DVD, and receiver appliances. The Shuttle XPC Media Center’s built-in analog TV tuners, FM radio tuner, dual format DVD writer, and 8-in-1 card reader, make it easy to enjoy TV, video, music and photographs with your friends and family. Based on Shuttle’s all new ‘M’ chassis, the Shuttle XPC Media Center sits stylishly within any home audio/visual entertainment center. But don’t be fooled by its simple exterior. Inside the attractive case you will find; analog TV tuners* supporting HDTV, time shifting, and real time or scheduled recording, high definition 7.1 channel audio, FM radio with pause and replay capabilities, and 3D graphics processing power from NVIDIA®."
At first glance, this looks like a home run for Shuttle: the M1000 has excellent integrated graphics for a Media Center PC (NVIDIA GeFORCE 6600 LE), 7.1 Creative Labs audio, a mere 24.8 db at idle, Gigabit Ethernet, support for the new instant-on feature of MCE2005 Update 2 (full startup in under 5 seconds from suspend), and hot-swappable 2.5" drive bay for expanding beyond the 250 GB of storage. Two things disappoint me about this: first, that it's not available as a barebones XPC, meaning you can only buy it from Shuttle fully configured. I've always preferred to buy the barebones units and configure them myself.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, this is an analog-only solution. Don't get me wrong, I have a dual-tuner MCE 2005 machine myself and it's fantastic, but somehow the M1000 doesn't seem very "next gen" without cable-box decoded HD. It's somewhat ironic that they have a section about the importance of HD, yet the MCE platform as a whole is being held back by the inability to work with the HDTV tuners that most of us have in our homes. Over-the-air HDTV isn't available in Canada, so it's not a viable solution for myself and likely many others. The M1000 includes two single analog tuners according to the images, but on the ordering page the only option is a "dual analog tuner". Since there are two slots, two dual tuners would have been a slick option to see. :D
My quibbles aside, this is an extremely impressive Media Center PC from Shuttle, and one that would blend in nicely with any entertainment center.
At first glance, this looks like a home run for Shuttle: the M1000 has excellent integrated graphics for a Media Center PC (NVIDIA GeFORCE 6600 LE), 7.1 Creative Labs audio, a mere 24.8 db at idle, Gigabit Ethernet, support for the new instant-on feature of MCE2005 Update 2 (full startup in under 5 seconds from suspend), and hot-swappable 2.5" drive bay for expanding beyond the 250 GB of storage. Two things disappoint me about this: first, that it's not available as a barebones XPC, meaning you can only buy it from Shuttle fully configured. I've always preferred to buy the barebones units and configure them myself.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, this is an analog-only solution. Don't get me wrong, I have a dual-tuner MCE 2005 machine myself and it's fantastic, but somehow the M1000 doesn't seem very "next gen" without cable-box decoded HD. It's somewhat ironic that they have a section about the importance of HD, yet the MCE platform as a whole is being held back by the inability to work with the HDTV tuners that most of us have in our homes. Over-the-air HDTV isn't available in Canada, so it's not a viable solution for myself and likely many others. The M1000 includes two single analog tuners according to the images, but on the ordering page the only option is a "dual analog tuner". Since there are two slots, two dual tuners would have been a slick option to see. :D
My quibbles aside, this is an extremely impressive Media Center PC from Shuttle, and one that would blend in nicely with any entertainment center.
