Shuttle Computer was founded in 1986 and is primarily based in Taiwan. The company makes a variety of motherboards, video cards, soundcards and other computer components. The first time I used a Shuttle part was in 1995 with the i440BX based Hot 641 motherboard. It was an awesome board that had all of the features of the Intel BX chipset and was my primary motherboard until I moved away from the P2-450 I used until 1997. Over the years, Shuttle has become a Tier-2 motherboard manufacturer with offices in Europe, Asia and the United States.

Mini-PCs have always been a fascination of mine. As desktop computers take up a lot of space, computer manufacturers designed some systems to conserve space. Mini-ATX systems, Flex-ATX systems ITX systems and others have been around for many years. Most of the time, however, these systems were underpowered, not all of the top of the line CPUs were supported or other concerns that caused these mini-PCs not to be very successful, and became niche products. Shuttle wanted to change all of that.

Shuttle has been making small form factor motherboards for several years. Their first foray into a barebones system such as the SK41G was the SV24 released in October 2001. This system supported the Pentium III/Celeron platform. As a first generation XPC it was hailed by reviewers as something different that boded well for the future Subsequent SFF (which Shuttle renamed XPCs) included the SB51, SK41G, SN51G, SN51G2 and others. I think it's important to look at where a platform has been in writing about a system which is why I gave the little history lesson. Last year, Shuttle went full-bore into the SFF market. They released numerous XPCs based on both the Intel and AMD platforms.

In September of last year, Doc Overclock, Niso and I attended the Shuttle XPC Revolution dinner with such notable guests as Anand from Anandtech, Cameron Rogers of Shuttle USA, and Carrie Cowan of NVIDIA. At the dinner I got to meet Ken Huang, the "founder of the XPC". Ken started working for Shuttle about 5 years ago and designed the XPC as a aesthetic as well as fully functional PC.