Shuttle To Sell Mobos
Shuttle, purveyor of excellent miniscule systems in a box, seems to be planning to re-enter the motherboard market soon:
"During a recent interview with Digitimes to be published during Computex 2007 (June 5-9), a Shuttle representative revealed that the company is planning to start shipping stand-alone motherboards for its XPC line of small form factor (SFF) PCs."
This could end up being a very good move for Shuttle, especially given the strong trend towards smaller form factor PCs in recent years.
Though the article doesn't cover the subject, it is worth speculating where Shuttle might go with their motherboards concept. There is already a healthy market for high end desktop motherboards, and it could be that Shuttle may eventually attempt to create a similar market for the SFF. Where most high end desktop boards rely on OCing options that may or may not make sense in a SFF package, it is more likely that Shuttle could make waves by offering unique features such as integrated Creative Labs audio chips, or perhaps physics (such as AGEIA) or network (Think Bigfoot Networks) accelerators. By putting these features on the board, they wouldn't take up an expansion slot, and thus would mean that SFF users wouldn't have to make many compromises. Such a board would probably come at a high price, but having everything in a single SFF package without sacrificing key components could make such a product well worth the money to some. Even if the dream of an extremely feature rich SFF motherboard never becomes a reality, it is nice to see that Shuttle is giving users the options to pick new motherboards and drop them in any case that they'll fit into.
Though the article doesn't cover the subject, it is worth speculating where Shuttle might go with their motherboards concept. There is already a healthy market for high end desktop motherboards, and it could be that Shuttle may eventually attempt to create a similar market for the SFF. Where most high end desktop boards rely on OCing options that may or may not make sense in a SFF package, it is more likely that Shuttle could make waves by offering unique features such as integrated Creative Labs audio chips, or perhaps physics (such as AGEIA) or network (Think Bigfoot Networks) accelerators. By putting these features on the board, they wouldn't take up an expansion slot, and thus would mean that SFF users wouldn't have to make many compromises. Such a board would probably come at a high price, but having everything in a single SFF package without sacrificing key components could make such a product well worth the money to some. Even if the dream of an extremely feature rich SFF motherboard never becomes a reality, it is nice to see that Shuttle is giving users the options to pick new motherboards and drop them in any case that they'll fit into.
