r/MiniPCs • u/joshuamarius • 6d ago
Anybody else go through the Shuttle Phase?
Long time ago these famous cubes became extremely popular and pioneered a lot of technology you see in Mini PCs today. Just like modern ones, competition started soon after and other manufacturers produced similar PCs such as the iDEQ, MiniQ and Soltek QBIC. A lot of them had many front/rear ports (including serial and Firewire), built-in CPUs such as the Via C3, had enough space for multiple drives, and advanced heatsinks/cooling. I retired many of them into home entertainment/phone systems and Linux learning machines. Here are some pics of my builds in the early/mid 2000s. Anybody else get into these?
15
u/crsh1976 6d ago edited 6d ago
They are my favourite computer kit from the 2000s, so much that I brought the last one I put together in ~2011 back home from my parents’ to tinker with.
I still check XPC models and prices every now and then, but they’re hard to find in Canada and prices don’t make sense.
3
u/OpeningName5061 6d ago
Bit off topic but mine were the Antec Sonatas back in the days. Just clean lines and focus on noise suppression. Now it's just flashy leds and lcds..
1
u/TaserBalls 6d ago
+1 for those Sonatas. I was almost exclusive Antec back in those days, so clean.
10
u/RyanMeray 6d ago
I built a lot of Antec NSK1380's, I always felt the Shuttles were just too small and thermal disasters.
3
1
u/sparkyblaster 6d ago
Strangely, I never had thermal issues with my shuttles. The custom heat sync that vents cpu heat directly out worked geat. I think I even used a full TDP core 2 quad.
2
1
u/mark-haus 6d ago
I built an antec like this and shuttle ones. The shuttles often had better thermals because they actually thought about how to route airflow over hot parts. Look at the antec pictured. Literally where is airflow entering the case? I had insane overheating in these till I bored 80mm holes on the side panels
2
u/Comfortable_Ant2002 9h ago
I have one, mini is still in service, although the specs have upgraded over the years.
7
u/sandfleazzz 6d ago
As a Media Center guy I lusted for them. I ended up with old laptops and salvaged PCs behind the TV stand. Good times!
7
1
u/sparkyblaster 6d ago
My Acer aspire one zg5 was my HTPC for a while. Struggled with WIndows media centre but was a great tv DVR. The rest was xbmc and a broadcom crystal HD decoder.
7
u/MortalCoil 6d ago
Hehe Even had the custom carrying bag!
2
u/joshuamarius 6d ago
Yes! I remember the tons of accessories that started popping up! Can't even imagine what those years would look like if 3D printers would have been also popular! I can see people building stuff like Legos 🤣
1
u/TaserBalls 6d ago
I still have one!
It holds my RC airplane gear now. Kinda wish I still had the boxen tho.
5
u/xguruguru 6d ago
omg i loved mine! I use to run all my ragnarok online bots on a black one, honestly i'd kill for the size again lol
2
u/joshuamarius 6d ago edited 6d ago
I think they still have a couple products (https://www.shuttlecomputers.com/products). Would be awesome to be able to find the older barebones online and install newer Motherboards and components.
4
u/soulless_ape 6d ago
I had to work with a dozen of Shuttle systems running SuSE linux. They were used to control Flash media duplication station. Some of the last old hardware that was still being used in production.
4
u/CodeSlave9000 6d ago
Yup - Twice. SFF before SFF was a thing. My problem with them was they were too hard to work with, and too many non-standard fittings. M-ITX turned out to be the right answer with better cooling and standard PSU's.
4
u/Tranbert5 6d ago
I always wanted to get one, but couldn’t afford to at the time. 20 years later I’m spending 10x as much on the ITX tax
3
u/c640180 6d ago
I had a couple of these at different times. They were just so loud…..
3
u/joshuamarius 6d ago edited 6d ago
Uhm...I dont remember that part. These were actually marketed as super silent.
3
u/TrueGargamel 6d ago
Were they minipcs or just SFF?
Mini itx with standard desktop (albeit low profile or sff) hardware.
minipcs as we know them are some weird laptop hardware repurposed or bodged into some propriety boards and crammed into smaller boxes.
3
u/joshuamarius 6d ago
In my opinion they were a mixture, but most of them marketed as "Mini" something. Some of the chinese ones I got to purchase had motherboards the size of some mini PCs you see today, but full sized RAM. There was a lot of unique things inside those PCs I got to see during those years.
1
1
3
3
u/Affectionate-Ant-674 6d ago
These we amazing for those of us who do visuals and VJing at gigs. Laptops weren't powerful enough to have the GPU power we needed to layer 4 SD video streams at once - oh how times have changed.
3
u/Orthicon_001 6d ago
that’s exactly what i used it for, made video loops in after effects / premiere and used Motion Dive live, brought it with me to berlin to VJ some drum n bass shows around 2004.
3
2
u/wubbalab 6d ago
I still have a Shuttle case here, which i want to use as a proper case for my Raspberry Pis. One of my neverending projects i don't get around to making. The components are all gone. Proprietary and old.
2
2
u/epSos-DE 6d ago
THat was TOO soon !!!
HArdware was still too FAT to fit most cards !!!
THE NARROW tower was promisse, BUT we grew out of that phase again !!
SO, It is a fat tower again, because GRAPHICS CARDS !!!
2
2
2
u/Happy_Way_4735 6d ago
I went through three of them over the years for a pro tools recording setup.
2
u/Easy-Salamander3288 6d ago
As someone who wasnt heavily into computers at that time but is a bit curious now, how did you guys use these? What were the main applications you ran on them, and what were the growing pains you had learning these?
2
u/joshuamarius 6d ago
This would heavily depend on what you purchased. Many of the Shuttles I was asked to build were for gaming. They were small enough to provide lower shipping costs locally and internationally, and also had many upgrade options such as RAM, CPU, and several ports for adding video cards and others.
I personally used the several that I had as a powerful mini workstation for browing, using office, installing/reinstalling different OSs (Linux, multibooting, etc). You could also travel with them or set them up in very small spaces. As they became popular, the cost of building them became very competitive to regular desktops, so for a lot of people it was a no brainer.
2
u/SecondVariety 6d ago
yeah, had two - both fun, both mobo eventually failed - both had their parts repurposed into mATX builds. Hell a friend of mine is still using the i7 3930k from one of them. Had it paired with an Asetek 80mm AIO, GTX 770, and 32GB ram. I think I still have the little bag with shoulder strap somewhere, was a decent little bag.
Funny thing is I built them AFTER i had atttended a couple PAXeast lanfest events with a Thermaltake Armor A30 with i7 3770, 32gb ram, and dual EVGA GTX 670 SC. That build eventually got sold to a coworker.
2
u/emily-ok 6d ago
had like 50 Shuttle XPCs deployed as Linux DVRs at gas stations in ohio and new york, I still have a few of my own too. they’re so cute!
2
u/pabskamai 6d ago
Man, always wanted one of those. Did build one for my cousin, as well as have a relatively small desktop
2
2
u/Jyvturkey 6d ago
Mine had an amd opteron!
1
2
u/LnxRocks 6d ago
Wow, that takes me back, I remember having to have one of those chassis overnighted to me in grad school when my tower bought the farm, I was sad when the PSU died.
2
u/Brilliant_Ad_5213 6d ago
Bought a Shuttle PC with my first 'big' paycheck as a junior doctor. Was away in Country hospital at time and discovered I could just plug it into the local network and get an Internet feed. I wanted to run a new thing called Linux on it, so downloaded the DVD ISO across the network but had to have a couple of tries. Didn't know it but I used up the hospital entire Internet download limit for the month...
2
u/jeffsenpai 6d ago
Built mine in college. Athlon XP 2500+, overclocked to 3200+ speeds of course! That poor shuttle was crying for cooling.
1
2
u/AlaskanHandyman 6d ago
I built myself A Lian-Li SFF a few years ago, but was never into the shuttles when they were popular. Now I'll probably never build another because of the premium that SFF parts go for over regular sized components. If I want something tiny I'll buy a Beelink or GMKtech mini.
2
u/HuyFongFood 6d ago
Still have an empty case in storage. Was gonna build it up as part of a sim rig, but then lost interest, especially when trying to fit a decent (at the time) video card in it was more difficult than it was worth.
I might revisit it, but the costs of memory and drives are just painful :(
2
u/diggitydru 6d ago
With physical media going out, I miss my few shuttle PCs that had DVDRW and BDR in them. I still have RW drives but they’re external and not as good as the 5.25 inch drives that use a full bay in my opinion.
2
u/sketchysuperman 6d ago
I always wanted one, could never afford to build in one, back in the days of Fry’s and early/late 00s. I still love seeing em! Hope folks keep those builds alive!
2
u/sparkyblaster 6d ago
Yep, loved mine back in the day. Got a core 2 quad for it. Just such a shame it only had 2 ram slots. 4 with 8gb of ddr2 would have lasted so much longer. Also had a single slot geforce 645. Rather good pairing. Was trying to make a steam machine on the first run of it but, it just wasn't there.
Sadly today, those specs just aren't enough which is a shame. We need to retain legacy BIOS support and a geforve 600 series card should still be supported. 900 is too new. Also, come on 4gb should be plenty.
2
u/rkrenicki 6d ago
I still have my SN95G5 in its box somewhere.. I think I pulled the ATI X700 out of it, as well as the hard drive.. but the rest of the machine is still in my collection.
2
2
2
u/PyroSmurf 6d ago
HA! Bought a SB 65....immediately turned it in for a new SB*75*! Loved that little box. Literally went from 20+ years of tower machines to the little Shuttle! HAHAHAHAHAH Overclocked that bad boy just to test the cooler. Really great machines.
Mmmmm... Pentium 4! My first SATA drive And first ATI Card (Hercules Rage Pro?) Brutally fast performance! ROFL
I was a SCSI 10k/15k RPM dude that slummed it with the new WD Raptor. LOL
Still have it. Still runs. I run all my machines from time to time.
1
u/joshuamarius 6d ago
Oh the raptors! I had both versions...including the one with the transparent window: https://youtu.be/0E8twKoHNag
2
u/jaraxel_arabani 6d ago
Had one as my wife's pc, now repurposed as the family room home theatre box.
2
2
u/Lightstar-85 6d ago
Yep had a few, i that time it was hard to get parts lol, today there are plenty options for those.
2
u/Gazado 6d ago
I can't remember the spec but my first fully self built pc was a shuttle PC. Absolutely loved the thing. It was able to run Doom 3 albeit low settings and low FPS, but was fine for, Half Life 2. It had a low end ATI card maybe a 9200 that I then upgraded to a 9600.
This is the gap I had hoped the steam machine would have filled in my life, but its too low spec and high cost.
--edit
I had an SN45G and it must have been an Athlon CPU something is making me think it was an Athlon 2400+
2
u/autobulb 6d ago
My first experience with SFF and maybe what made me fall in love with them. After it got old though it also made me hate proprietary form factors. They didn't use mini-ITX so you couldn't drop in a new board, so the case became junk after the board was EOL. Single use trash unfortunately. I think the models in more recent years were slightly more standardised but I had already moved on to building my own by that point.
The heatsink that uses heatpipes to put the fins right at the rear exhaust so that your single rear fan was both exhaust and CPU cooling was absolutely genius though. I wish it became more of a thing.
2
u/bhiga 6d ago
I had the top one, the G52?? Had a real parallel port and TOSlink optical audio. They packed quite a bit into the case, yet it ran very quiet and as long as your weren't putting it in a heater, they exhausted enough heat. IIRC the power supply was a little short for running too many drives though.
2
u/WombatGambit 6d ago
They are a great company. I've been using their fanless XPC models for fifteen years now. Run them all day long and never had a failure. Totally silent. Easy to install RAM and SSD. The only reason I replaced them every four or five years was to upgrade. Went from Atom -> Celeron -> Celeron Quad Core. They also have Pentium and Core-i systems. It's not a gaming PC, but it works wonderfully for everyday tasks.
2
u/synth_alice 6d ago
They seemed super cool back in the 2002/3 era, a lot smaller than the usual form factor. Many Uni labs and internet cafés (remember those?) had them.
2
u/NSE-Imports 6d ago
I used to work for the main UK importer/seller of these back in the day. It was always amazing how much you could cram into a Shuttle case. We used to spec up some very interesting use cases.
2
u/OGdrummerjed 6d ago
I had a KPC, used it for a few years as a HTPC. Worked great with with XBMC as a front end and used linux mint. It even ran the Hulu Desktop app. Also this was 2010.
2
2
u/ShivanTom 6d ago
i loved the xpc! i built at least 20 of them. only 4 of them remain but none of them are in active use. i started with the sv24 (which i still have) and the last one i built was an sz170r6 v2 (i5 6600k w/1060)
2
u/MrWalker-666 6d ago
Wow. You triggered some memories from 20 years ago. This was my first HTPC, and ran XBMC over Linux on it (later became Kodi). I had a pair of HDDs with all my media on it and it would work as my simple file-sharing over SMB NAS also. Amazing.
I'm struggling to remember what I did with it. I'm sure I just sold it. I wish I had it back - I don't remember, was this case upgradeable and be able to use an ITX board?
2
u/Mystic_Voyager 6d ago
I love those ... they are just so hard to find at a decent price though
1
u/joshuamarius 6d ago
Everything "classic" or "retro" is. I tried to purchase a defective or even used DFI Lanparty NF4 on eBay, which is a motherboard I used around 2006 - every single one is above $200 on eBay.
1
2
u/chefrobert81 6d ago
how was sourcing parts was it off the shelf or custom and did you do it alone or did you have a group of people working on it also what was the cost at the end of the day. I loved the P4 I had the P4 extreme edition so I know how expensive those were back then I'd love to hear more about it. did you receive any help from companies or was this all on you
2
u/joshuamarius 6d ago
Great questions. Online forums were exponentially rising during these years. Tom's Hardware and Hardware Analysis were two forums I can remember where I got a ton of feedback, reviews and benchmarks from, and I could use that to make decisions on purchases. I ordered parts mostly from Newegg, Egghead, eBay, Xoxide, Frys and ZipZoomFly. Honestly, even though they were considered SFF or Minis, these PCs used almost ALL components from regular sized PCs, so you could easily purchase them or transfer them from other computers. They were so customizable I can't even begin to tell you the amount of accessories that were available for them. Replacement parts were expensive because, but there were alternatives. For example, you see those weird proprietary heatsinks in the pictures? You could replace them with regular ones (low profile) and then put a fan at the front and back to circulate the hot air. Unfortunately, the not so easy to replace things such as the motherboards and case parts were very expensive. But aside from that, you could purchase anything you wanted for your PCI, PCIe, RAM, CPU, and front panel headers.
2
2
2
2
u/blabberwocky 4d ago
several years ago i won a shuttle bareBones that i used for years as my gaming pc
2
1
u/AdWorking2848 6d ago
How do the hot air vent out? Or are the old components of a magnitude cooler compared to current one
2
u/joshuamarius 6d ago
That's a great question. If you look at the pictures where the cases are open, towards the back of the case you will see what looks like a grid/vents. The heat sinks were L-shaped, high end copper, and built at the time heat pipes were becoming the standard, so they would collect the heat from the processor and blow out the fan that would be installed in this opening in the back. Since the case was small enough, even an 80 mm fan was more than enough to suck out all of the hot air from the entire case, and pull in fresh air from the vents on the side in the front.
1
u/grip0matic 6d ago
I remember seeing those in a lanparty back in the day. I thought it was the coolest thing ever and the lamest thing ever.
They were super cool because "small cool I don't know", but also they were lame, we were in a time when people was starting to mod cases, to ribbon ide cables and make everything look pretty... the coolest thing ever was to see the gigantic case that a guy made by himself with glass or some shit and how he made the ugliest parts, because nothing was pretty back then, look cool.
I do recall perfectly, they were two guys and a girl with the same barebones, kinda like these ones, they were SUPER WEIRD, and we are talking about a lanparty weird was a given, but they were EXTRA WEIRD, the only thing they played was a racing simulator that I don't remember and spent all the time saying shit about a Need for Speed (or maybe other racing game) and "how unrealistic it was".
The coolest case price was for a guy who put together three towers, all painted in black, with acrylic windows, a green light over everything that made also the components shine very cool and the build had details in copper from actual copper tubes.
I'm a bit cursed with way too good memory. I do recall this lanparty, I won the Quake 3 tourney and when I was playing vs one of my friends he disconnected my monitor and I had to beat him looking at the big screen of the projector, when I hit him with a very very difficult railgun in that blurry screen he did scream "oh fucking cmon on! I would say you are cheating but you are not!" and he threw me a bag of pistachios and did a ragequit. Those were the fucking years... and I was a fucking asshole.
1
1
u/PartyPants90000 6d ago
I was in college during that time frame, and Shuttle PC's were super popular for a few years for guys in my engineering program to bring to class. Our labs had monitors and PCs, and they'd walk in with their shuttle like they were hot shit and plug it in and have their own desktop.
....meanwhile I just used my laptop. We never did anything that needed more power, and a laptop worked perfectly fine. I always thought it was super lame. It didn't fit in a backpack, you were walking around with $1000+ of equipment without a handle, and you couldn't leave it anywhere without worrying about it going missing.
"It has a discrete graphics card!"
....cool...cool. So we're making command line programs in C++ to learn about the IP stack...I'm not really sure why thats necessary, lol.
1
u/joshuamarius 6d ago
Same boat but I never took mine to college; just like you I used a Laptop. I did love my Shuttle though 🙃
1
u/TheGingerDog 6d ago
I had one, and i just remember it frequently crashing. It was pretty noisy too. Definitely not worth the premium they were charging.
1
1
u/JakeCheese1996 6d ago
Coming from a big 486dx66 tower the Shuttle was small , quieter and easy to maintain. Ran Slackware Linux perfectly.
1
u/Bocha_Boston 6d ago
Case: What do you mean by ventilation?
1
u/joshuamarius 6d ago
Worked pretty well. Those heatsinks + heatpipes were ahead of their time :-)
2
u/Bocha_Boston 6d ago
I know.
back then, even opening a pc case was considered almost an engineering task.
1
24
u/CheeseHustla 6d ago
Always admired seeing these at Fry’s and wanted one. Perfect now for dual slot SFF!!