Remember Shuttle Barebone PC? Mini PC for Retro Gaming!

I have never played Medal of Honor and you have motivated me to give it a try with this video. I am playing it on my old Athlon Xp and am enjoying it quite a lot. Thanks.

My win 98 PC is one of these. It's got an Athlon XP 2600 and a Radeon 9600xt. Only drawback is the noise, it's way louder than you'd expect.

I loved the last shuttle XPS line. I had 6 of them for my first render farm. They all were 6-core intel chips BUT could be upgraded to a Xeon 8-core chip. But after having the systems for 2-3 years, dropping another $300 for a new chip with just 2 more cores made little seance. The First few I bought knew, but they stopped making them. So the last couple, I needed to buy them off eBay. I was SHOCKED at the bidding wars I was in. My budget for one of these was around $1500. But on eBay, I bought the last two for around $1800. That speaks to how these shuttle systems had a very loyal following before the modern mini/micro ATX motherboards.

How weird! I was just thinking of my old shuttle pc today!

Im looking for one for 10 years. On ebay one in 10 years for dig money, nowhere else i found one. Did not watch the video yet. 😅

SS51G is where its at.

I owned two Shuttle PCs back in the day. They were pretty much doomed because of the ever increasing size of GPUs.

I remember my friend having one and finding how mediocre (even for the time) it's specs were.

Shuttle PC's were really popular in the mid 2000s, and I agree with that. They had an interesting case design that was not attempted on the mass market before, and they executed quite well the concept. The only major pitfall is that Shuttle could not drive more parts manufacturers to focus on airflow efficiency and cooling, as happened in the professional area with rackmount systems. This would have went a long way towards early standardization and a true leap in capabilities.

Probably the biggest mistake of Shuttle is that they did not focus on the low-end as well as the high-end market, they served only the mainstream. When they fell behind in innovation, they could not survive in either and they did not have a long-term strategy. There was also the case of miss-management at this company.

The irony is that the micro-ATX format and other even more compact formats have been made much more popular, indirectly, through Shuttle designs. We probably would not talk about NUCs if Shuttle or someone else was not present before to showcase this approach. Hats off to them!

I have had three shuttle computers in the early 2000s. The proprietary power supplies died on all of them… seems to be very low quality PSU on these units unfortunately. And replacement units were way too expensive, and warranty had expired so they became e-waste. Other than that, they were nice.

i loved this PC

I loved these ones back in the day and installed quite a few of them for my friends. I actually bought one just like this last year for some retro gaming. I remember we had a black XC Cube for socket 939 which a friend of mine and me used to host some websites on. I am still looking for that one for a decent price, just for the nostalgia.

You should do DDR 3 775 intel board in it, mARX, Windows 10 x64 on 10 year old crap

I had 1 like this back in the day - an SK41G. I don't think I sold it but I've absolutely no idea where it is now! EDIT: Shuttle PCs are still in production supporting 13th gen Intel.

Oh, im still using my old shuttle SB62G2 with an Intel P4 3Ghz, at the moment only DOS but I need to improve it a little.It's there a way to multiply PCI ports? I thing it sound weird, but maybe there's something outside...

I power it on. If it works then I clean all up. Only then I'll start experimenting with it.

I always test everything first, before any cleaning or restoration. Due to geography I'm limited to buying this stuff on eBay, and I've used the "not received as described" return process many times when something is advertised as "used but functional" and it turns out not to be. In those cases, you've gotta be able to send it back in the same condition you received it. If you clean it first, the seller may claim that you switched-out the item and sent back a broken one.

I have owned more than 10 Shuttle XPCs before. They bring back good memories.
After Shuttle stopped updating the XPC, I switched to Intel NUCs. Now I have the NUC3, NUC 7 Skull Canyon, and NUC 11 Extreme

these were great pc's. we used them in my workplace due to their small footprint and good performance for their size.

I bought 2 of these Shuttle XPC's when they came out. I still have 1 of them and I love it. They're so handy to have around for booting into Win98 or WInXP.

oh damn haven't seen this pc in forever

Hi Phil, awesome and insightful video! I really appreciate you so much for spotlighting this nostalgic brand that feels 'forgotten' in this new age of PC building. For those of you who don't know, Shuttle still exists! My boyfriend actually works for Shuttle and we watched your video together; he enjoys watching PC reviewers all the time and was really happy to see Shuttle showcased. He is more than happy to answer any questions about their recent stuff :).

I've wanted this pc so bad back in the Windows XP days. I recently built another new gaming PC with a similar square case, the Corsair Carbide Air 540 but it's not horizontal like the shuttle case. Maybe in the future I'll build a new gaming PC with a horizontal cube case that I always wanted

My dad invented the xpc he was the mastermind behind all of this and was the VP of the shuttle company( once called shuttle now changed name) . sadly he left the company in 2005 due to the company family civil war. since then the XPC has had no changes in look or design since 2003 and has gone downhill. My dad once told me has had better design in mind but you know he left the industries 10+ years ago and changed career to a different field now. I think he is still a computer genius who knows the electrical fundamentals inside and out and is a super handyman can fix everything. Also FYI I am currently on 4th gen i7 SZ87R6 my dad got it for me free from his connection. with 500W silver plus PSU , max out 32gb ram and with a GTX1080. still plays games with 1080P well

Back in the late 90s I got a couple of these and got each of my kids one of these because they were cheap for about $120 - $140 each at the Computer show for the barebone which just need to install a hard drive and connect to a monitor and keyboard, mouse and done. It works great with Windows 98 and then XP. Anything beyond XP because I believe usually they max out at 4GB it start to become slow.

Since XP is no longer supported most websites does not work with it. It is still great to either put Win 98 or XP and use mainly as a gaming computer for older PC games.

I got a couple of these a few years ago for $5 each at a garage sale so they are great to just put Linux or an older Win OS. Nothing more you can do on it unfortunately.

I remember these having major issues with cooling. A friend of mine bought into these by time the Radeon 9800 Pro was the bomb.I think he downgraded from one of those beefy Thermaltake Xaser cases. I was not jeallous.

Had loads of issues with various NVidia cards (that appeared to install ok), try an ATI card and see if that fixes Draken.

i have something like this, i plan to make a video but afther i start i have smoke round my room evenriwhere ... my little body is maybe die,n i still must test him again

I always loved these and wanted to build one so badly for hauling around to LAN parties but could never afford a second PC. To this day I still have a soft spot for cube cases and have a ThermalTake Core V1 that I'm debating what hardware I want to put in it. I see these old Shuttles come up on eBay and worry about the reliability of those power supplies but I'm sure one day I'll end up with one!

A good friend of mine still has a Shuttle system sitting in his garage, the case has a windowed top and sides. And it is, and was when new, absolute garbage. I can't remember what is in it, but it runs way too hot most of the time and even when the temps can be brought down, it was too slow to even be a decent media center. It got relegated to network storage duties for a long while and it was almost too slow for that too.

You would expect these type of case to still exist in these time but they sadly dont

Wow, I had one of those back in the day and I loved it. I can't remember which AGP graphics card I used, but I do remember that this had a Nvidia nForce chipset.

It's so strange seeing an (automatic driver installer) manager tool being recommended by pretty much everyone. 😅

The ones I always tried 13+ years ago were always fake, or beggerware(I'm a fake antivirus, pay meee!! ) from some waste domain

I have had three of these. One with AMD Athlon XP 3200+, one with a celeron. They both died. The only one remaining is an Athlon 64 Model. They are nice compact machines, but I am not convinced of their longevity.

Hey Phil. My shuttle was working when I put it safely in the garage over 10 years ago. I take it out now because I am looking for some files and it won't power on. What could be the problem 😢

Such a nice size factor; you can stack three of them on top of each other ;-) instead of one P4 tower

Those were wonderful machines, at one point i had three of them. Id bring two to lan parties, one for hosting servers and the other to game on.
Still have a SB51G in which i have a 1.8ghz Pentium 4 on which i intentionally broke off the FSB indicator pin to force it to run at 2.4ghz as the bios is lacking that setting.
My main gaming rig at the time was a SN41G2, it also lacked some bios settings so to up the multiplier to run my AMD Barton 2500+ at 3200+ speeds id put single wire strand jumpers between pinholes in the socket. That coupled with 1GB of dual channel DDR and a Radeon 9700 made it quite the beast at the time. A quick mod i figured out was that one could easily mod the stock fan shroud to accept a 92mm fan, it sits a bit off center but is quieter than an 80mm for the same performance.

I have the same Shuttle with Win98. Config: Athlon 2800+, 2x256 DDR @400MHz, FX5700, SB Live 0100.
ALL works perfect in Win98 and DOS. SB Live 0100 with Joseph's Audigy 2 ZS Drivers for Sound Blaster Live! works in DOS well.

I hate shuttle becauso of ther non-standard-components. Strange I/O-shield, strange PSU and of course a non-itx-mainoard.

I still have mine from back in 2003 and it's my favorite Retro PC now: the SK41G. It's an Athlon XP-M 2600+ which can change the multiplier anytime on the fly, for the sound I'm using the TTSOLO-1 with the DreamBlaster S1 on it, and a Quadro4 980 XGL for the graphics, but this computer can also run a Voodoo3 without any problems! It's just a wonderful machine for Windows 98 with great DOS compatibility.

I love these little machines, we do retro lans with these. I got an Athlon XP 3000+ 2GB RAM and GeForce 6800 512MB in mine. All the good old games work. Also with a good 4:3 tft we need very little space compared to the early 2000s.

Yup i remember these

the biggest problem with these units is the price of the motherboard. ITX format is one of the most expensive boards around. I had one of thjese and put in a AM2 based motherboard and it worked well, but it was impossible for me to upgrade to a AM4 platform.

I'm actually highly considering getting one of these to dual-boot into Win98 and WinXP. There's a spot on my desk where it would fit perfectly! I especially like the look of the Music XPC Professional. It sort of has that old school radio look to it on the front. Though, I may just end up getting a cheaper AMD Athlon one and covering the front of it with some wood grain tape, instead.

I have a shuttle as my kids gaming PC, and have the largest i5 that the 250W PSU will let me run alongside a GTX1650. Looking to upgrade to another Shuttle model as they are super short depth to fit my entertainment unit

we sold alot of them at the time. very popular

Had also two of those.
A SN45G with an athlon xp 2600+ mobile which did run overclocked during its whole life, with a 9800pro. I still have it and had to replace the agp slot. It now runs with a x800xt. I did modify it to run an aqua computer watercooling kit, but the cpu bracket I managed to create wasn't good enough. There are some pictures of this monstrosity... !
And then a sd39p2 with a core2duo e6600 @ 3.6GHz. This design was much better with the cooling done sideways.
Great memories of well thought machines, which came along in lan events quite a lot. We did stack our shuttle with a friend. I don't know if it was a cool factor like other running a chiller, but at least with flat screen maintream at that time, it was much easier to move around!

I worked on a bunch of Shuttle PCs like this in the mid-2000s. The company I worked for sold kiosks that were powered by these machines. It made it really quick to swap the machine out at the customer site rather than pulling parts out trying to troubleshoot a fault in the middle of the customer's foyer. They still used Windows 98 because they used the same key on every machine and XP would have required activation. Originally they would build each machine from scratch, but I started using disk imaging to build them instead, which dropped the build time from around 3 hours to about an hour. I ended up quitting because reasons, basically I really hated the job. The boss asked me to document the imaging process before I left but I just told him it's really easy, you basically just follow the prompts. I missed out a few key steps afterwards that needed to be done in the right order or the machine would just blue screen and require reimaging.