Digital Home Thoughts: Shuttle’s ST62K XPC: Small & Silent

A Mixed Bag For My Needs, Perhaps a Winner For Yours?
Overall, I have mixed feelings about the ST62K. On one hand, it’s small, great-looking, very quiet, and comes chock-full of integrated functionality. It would make a great media centre-type PC – put in a big 250 GB hard drive, a PCI TV tuner, and load up Snapstream’s Beyond TV 3, and you’re laughing. Or, if you’re deploying systems in an office environment the ST62K would make a perfect office computer: small, quiet, and highly functional. Special emphasis on the quiet part – office environments tend to be brutally noisy, usually because of the computers, so the stealthy ST62K would be especially welcomed there.

On the other hand, I wanted this to be the basis for my new personal computer, but it can’t be. The lack of Serial ATA support means I have to ditch my 160 GB hard drives and spend hundreds of dollars on outdated ATA100 hard drives, which is frustrating considering those drives are less than six months old. The lack of a front Firewire port means I’d have to run a cable from the back when I want to connect my DV camera, which I find unacceptable. But most frustrating of all is that without an AGP port, I’m unable to connect my twin 17" Samsung LCD monitors, and I’ve grown very accustomed to working with two monitors. Yes, it might be possible to track down a PCI card with twin outputs (my SS51G was unable to work with integrated VGA + AGP card at the same time), but I’d probably end up with even worse 3D performance. And on a 1280 x 1024 native resolution LCD monitor, playing games at anything less than that resolution is ugly.

So, despite how impressed I am with the ST62K, I’ll probably end up building a secondary system around it and will keep my very loud SB65G2 in service – at least until Shuttle takes the same external power supply concept and applies it to a new Shuttle designed with less compromises. When that happens, I’ll be happy indeed! In the meantime, if you haven’t invested in Serial ATA hard drives and aren’t a serious gamer (or videographer), Shuttle’s ST62K gets a very strong recommendation from me as a good choice for a personal computer well-suited to being general SOHO computer or a media centre-type PC.