Digital Home Thoughts: Powerful, Small, Stealthy: Shuttle's SD11G5 XPC

Day to Day Usage
I've been using the Shuttle as my main workstation for a little over a week as of this writing, and I'm extremely impressed. Prior to this unit, my workstation was a Shuttle SB95P2, which is Shuttle's high-end powerhouse machine, but also one of their noisiest products. Inside the SB95P2 I had an NVIDIA 6800GT video card, a 3.4 Ghz Pentium 4 CPU, two 74GB Western Digital Raptor drives in RAID0, a 16x DVD burner, and 2 GB of RAM. It was a high-performance beast, but it was frustratingly loud. It had a power supply fan, a fan at the front, and the video card had a fan. It wasn't as loud as some machines are, but it was far too loud for my tastes.


Figure 20: Sitting atop its perch, happy (and silently) working away. I wish I didn't need to have that memory card reader beside it.

The SD11G5 is, for me, the perfect blend of performance and silence. The overclocked Pentium M CPU is very zippy, and when combined with the Raptor X hard drive and 2 GB of Kingston RAM, I find that my workstation feels faster than the previous Shuttle XPC I was using. Combine that with the low noise factor, and you have my ideal machine: one that allows me to work hard and fast, but doesn't make any noise. I've had zero issues with the SD11G5 in day to day, and I expect it to stay that way.


Figure 21: My workstation.

Already Outdated?
In some ways, the SD11G5's days are already numbered because it's incompatible with the new Core Duo processors from Intel. Yes, that's right, Intel requires a totally new chipset to utilize the Core Duo CPUs, which means Shuttle will undoubtedly release a new version of this unit to work with the Core Duo. You've got to hand it to Intel – they can't seem to make any chipset that lasts for more than four months, and that's impressively hard to do when you compare them to how nicely AMD handled the move from single-core to dual-core CPUs.

These CPUs are currently shipping in laptops from Toshiba, Dell, Apple, and others. They're also in the new Mac Mini. At the time of this writing, New Egg has a listing for the Core Duo T2500 - it's a 2.0 Ghz CPU with two cores selling for $417 USD. The Pentium M is a great CPU with an excellent power/performance ratio, but the Core Duo is even better and would give an across the board boost in almost every scenario, especially in digital media editing/encoding.

Summing it All Up
The SD11G5, like all Shuttle XPC units, represent excellent value for the money, but you do pay a premium for the miniaturization technology in these little boxes. The SD11G5 is not the computer for someone on a budget – Pentium M CPUs are not cheap, so if cheap is what you want, look elsewhere. That said, if you have another PC that you'd like to transplant into the SD11G5, all you need to buy is the CPU. I expect to get great use out of the SD11G5 and have no qualms recommending it to others, with one exception: depending on the type of optical drive they have, they may have trouble with it. I'd dearly like to see Shuttle come up with a better optical drive bay door solution, because having to buy a new optical drive and hoping that it works is a poor solution. Shuttle has clever engineers working for them, so I'm sure they can come up with a clever solution if they try. Beyond that, and the obvious limitations of having the SD11G5 only ship in white and with on DVI port, the SD11G5 is a superb computer.

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Alberta, Canada.