Shuttle's XS35 nettop is 3.3cm thin, too nice to hide behind your HDTV
By Tim Stevens 
posted February 26th 2010 10:54AM
posted February 26th 2010 10:54AM
posted February 26th 2010 10:54AM
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This thing looks really beautiful. And the best thing about it? Passively cooled, oh yeah.
That is very very pretty...
I wonder just how low power it is.
Wow. I'm going to be honest. I'm rather impressed. What's the equivalent to ION2 in GPU terms?
@ElCapitan Enough to play any HD movies, including uncompressed blu-ray, not enough to play 3D games at maxed out settings :)
@ElCapitan The Shuttle EU press release alludes to the Ion2 as a GT218 as you can see here: http://www.shuttle.eu/press/press-releases/view/just-33-cm-thin-and-energy-saving-hd-compatible-mini-pc-solution-from-shuttle/f96f4a21b6/54/
@(Unverified) i.e. Perfect for slapping in a nice terabyte hard disk and putting your HD video collection on :)
This would be excellent as a home media centre, especially as they've even put an HDMI out port for your TV...
And you could probably swap in a SSD if you wanted to eliminate all HD noise...
Wow that is impressive. It's almost smaller than some external DVD drives.
I'm looking for a small form factor and quiet PC to hook up to my HDTV. Will it be yours Shuttle? Give me the right price, 2GB RAM, and an option to do away with the ODD and you got me.
The only thing that'd make it even cooler for me, would be a slot-in dvd drive :)
No?
I wonder if it will be the slower ION 2 or the faster ION 2 since that's what I've been hearing around the web.
awesome. but why make such a sexy box and then only put VGA on it?
@notatoad
Zapp Brannigan reading fail
"Ion 2 graphics with HDMI output for easy connectivity to your high definition display of choice"
Hopefully there will be a blu ray option. Add a USB cable card tuner, and you have the perfect settop box.
Wonder how it'd handle W7/WMC with a USB TV tuner and hooked up to my WHS.
@ilh - With a couple of built-in HDTV tuners, this thing would be complete. We're rapidly reaching the point where it's just a no-brainer to hang one of these things behind your flat screen, plug in a network cable, TV antenna, and HDMI, and have a perfect little Media Center/web browser.
-
Oh yeah, and, what's with the wired kb/mouse? These should obviously be wireless. Finishing touch: an IR port for a Media Center remote. Perfection.
@ArtInvent wouldn't RF instead of IR be more responsive for a remote if the unit is going to be behind the hdtv? or even BT
full screen flash for hulu, HD youtube?
Shuttle waited too long while the competition passed them up. I would have bought their nettop had it come out a few months ago but I already purchased another device.
Other then the CD drive, and of course the slightly updated specs, this is basically an Acer Revo (which I just bought for an XBMC box).
It is most definitely alot nicer looking though.
This is will kill off and knock prices off from pieces such as ASRock Ion 330, Asus eeebox EB1012 in the following months.
@theguedz
I doubt it. The AsRock and Asus nettops both have build-in optical drives. It's hard to put price pressure on something if you don't at least match the features.
@Spiny Norman Umm...its has a disc drive. so i second theguedz's point
@Spiny Norman i beg to differ, they say here this shuttle unit has an optical drive.
Passive cooling, plus ion2 buzz and higher version atom processor... these 2 units I was saying must come down. So, I'm eager to know what other brands will have in store, unless I'm missing any new nettops...
This is a pretty slick device. I hope they don't price it out of reality. I want something exactly like this for my wife's mom.
Cool. One of these on the back of a nice 22" LCD TV would make a nice little AIO style PC/TV combination.
So could this thing play my 1080p .mkv files? I'm guessing it'll have a bit of trouble playing compressed 1080p videos.
@max3000
I have a Samsung N510 (first gen ION) and it plays 1080p mkv's no problem providing you reroute the decoding the GPU. I use the CoreAVC codec and pretty much every media player (except VLC) has flawless playback of 1080p video.
I have a USB powered blu ray drive and using PowerDVD, the blu-ray playback is perfect too.
So, this new generation of Atom/ION will be able to cope with anything you care to throw at it ...providing the decoding is handled by the GPU.
@muttleyuk That's great to hear. So you're basically using a codec that adds GPU acceleration?
I havn't used a Shuttle PC in...Well, ever, can anyone comment on the quality/dependability?
Needless to say, this does look slick, and the fact that its fanless makes it perfect for HTPC.
That's sexy, but passively cooled scares me a bit.
I'll yank the HD and throw in a SSD replace the optical with Bluray . . . can't believe they found room for an optical drive.
XBMC!?!?! Hell yes! That thing would be beautiful for it!
Looks really nice, but I wish it didn't have a door over the CD drive. I hate cases with doors. I'd also prefer that it be larger so it could contain a full-sized Blu-ray drive.
Nit-picking aside, this looks like a great HTPC. I love the passive cooling, and I think replacing the HDD with an SSD drive would make it a perfect quiet machine for XBMC.
Now, I see that it has HDMI out, but does it support advanced audio codecs like 7.1 PCM, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS Master Audio? Or is it just another SPDIF-capable interface?
Guys, beware of the Ion 2 / Intel DMI licensing issue.
To sum it up: because of a licensing restriction, almost all PC / mobo manufacturers will likely only give the Ion 2 a single PCIe 1.0 lane (250mbit/s) for ALL of it's inbound and outbound bandwidth, a severe bottleneck. What this means to the HTPC crowd: Performance under the hood improves in all categories (if marginally) except one tiny area: Flash 10.1 video above 480p.
That's right, all Ion2 machines produced before Intel/nVidia's legal battle over licensing is settled will likely be unable to play any flash video without stutters above 480p.
Silver lining: nvidia promises an updated driver in June that works around this issue.
Read about it at the Anandtech review of the Zotac ion2 Zbox.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3702/zotacs-zbox-hdid11-review-next-gen-ion-better-worse-than-ion1 The first page of the review explains the DMI licensing issue and the 6th page covers the flash 10.1 issue specifically.
To those asking why Ion 2 would be running on a PCIe lane: if you recall, Intel has always connected the chipset to the CPU via the FSB (frontside bus) - Intel moved beyond FSB and now has "DMI" - and they claim that nVidia doesn't have licensing rights to operate on DMI. So the workaround is to re-route the Ion2 via PCIe 1.0 - and the PC Manuf's don't want to use more than one PCIe 1.0 lane because the other PCIe lanes are needed for onboard wifi, onboard ethernet, etc.
@anth edit: Forgot to mention that atom 330 systems are not affected by this as they use FSB, not DMI. This issue applies to Ion2s combined with the new Pine Trail Atom processors like the one powering the Shuttle xs35 (the D510).
Hope this info helps.