![]() To put things in perspective, at press time, a slightly less well-equipped Dell Dimension 4600 sold for around $950, although the more compact 4600C came in at roughly $900. With the XPC's street price of around $329 and the components adding up to about $370, this well rounded system was complete for just about $700. ![]() Let there be no doubt: this is a serious system.įor our tests, we selected a middle of the road configuration, including a Pentium 4 2.6 GHz Hyperthreading processor, an 80 gig Seagate SATA hard disk, one 512 meg module of Micron/Crucial PC3200 DDR SDRAM and a 48×24×48×16 Liteon DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive. The system also includes RAID support, not one, but two, network cards, six USB 2.0 ports (two on the front), AGP 8x, PC3200 memory and Serial ATA. The SB62G2 XPC supports a full range of current Intel Celeron and Pentium 4 processors including the 3.2 GHz and the 3.0 GHz “Extreme Edition” models, both of which take advantage of the system's 800 MHz front side bus (for a more humble budget, the same XPC can go as low as the Celeron 1.8 GHz CPU). ![]() If your user base is packed in small offices or cubicles, the XPC ought to be right up their alley - it will leave plenty of legroom under the desk if placed there or it can sit unobtrusively on the desk.ĭespite the urge to assume otherwise, I repeat: the XPC packs all of the latest features you'll probably want and need. In a space no larger than an average-sized shoebox (about 12” × 7 1/2” × 7 1/2”), the XPC packs all of the latest features you'll most likely need (and want) in a system. Why? For starters, it features a very compact footprint. If you would like, you could, of course, take care of the GNU/Linux installation using another system or an external CD drive.Īs soon as anyone in your office sees an XPC, you can count on those people wanting one. We also added an optical drive so that we could install the included copy of Mandrake Linux directly onto the new little system. To take a Shuttle XPC from the box to the desk, you need three things: a processor, a hard disk and some RAM. However, with Shuttle's easy to follow instructions and bundled motherboard, “I.C.E.” cooling system, case and software, the project isn't nearly as time consuming as building a totally do-it-yourself system (in case you are wondering, all of the hardware that comes with the system is already assembled). In a way, purchasing one of Shuttle's “barebones” PC's nears the experience of building a system from scratch. One shouldn't take the SB62G2's small size to mean a small feature set - this is a serious machine. A processor is needed and so are a number of other components. Of course, Shuttle systems aren't quite the same as a Hewlett-Packard: there is some assembly required. This model came out a few months ago and arrived to us fresh from Taiwan. Over the past month at OfB Labs, I have spent a lot of time with Shuttle's new SB62G2 XPC. However, if you are looking for systems that offer something more than a basic tower that includes GNU/Linux, you need to look elsewhere - at Shuttle. You could also go with HP Compaq's d220/d330 series of computers that offer Mandrake Linux 9.1 preloaded. You could continue buying systems from OEMs such as Dell and Gateway that do not support GNU/Linux and simply replace the systems' included OS with a GNU/Linux disk image. When deploying GNU/Linux systems, there is always the predicament of what kind of system to use.
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