CrunchGear

You had my interest until you said 150GB HD… what???? You spend over 3K$ and it ONLY comes with (albeit fast), feeble little HD? With that kind of space, you have a beautiful case next to an Iomega 1.5TB backup solution which doesn’t match… kinda ruins the entire look doesn’t it?

The amount of RAM (for the price tag) is a joke too… they should simply give it a black color and re-invest the money in the cool flames back into the products internal specs… otherwise all this horsepower from the quads is wasted. Quads need lots of ram to run at their best.

Jon

You’re paying 3.5 k for the small form factor combined with all the other extras. Yeah 2 GB of ram is a little small, but you’d never need anymore than that because nothing comes close to even scratching 2gb of ram usage…

Jon, the problem is all the “extras” look nice on paper but this machine has too much horsepower and too little in reserve… you will have a bottleneck in the RAM department and if you play more then a few games or do photo editing… another one in the storage department. How many pictures do you need to take with a 10MP camera before you fill up a 150GB HD? Well… I don’t know but I am sure you will run out of room sooner or later. Unluckily for me, if I take a picture of myself… you always show up in them :-( Why… why… why? ;-)

Jon

This is true, but I’d assume for a small-form or almost travelling PC, this would be only a couple games machine. If you need for than that, you probably shouldn’t be trying to travel with a PC at all.

You also have the space factor to fit everything into. A liquid cool system is expensive enough already, and cramming it into a 12 x 9 x 9 space is pretty tough. Combine that with a drive, 2 graphics cards, USB ports, sound ports, etc, you’re running low on space.

However, if you do to their website, I think the entire system looks ridiculous with the entire matching set of mice and keyboards. I guess this is one of those things that people buy when they’ve run of nerdy things to spend money on.

If I need to travel with a computer - I use something called a laptop. If I want to use something with a small form factor, I got my girlfriend. If I want something that is designed to bottleneck and will give me grief financially then I am with you Jon… I will buy this machine ;-)

Jon

1337 people don’t type “1337″ anymore do they? Please tell me they don’t.

And flames are so 2006.

I’m not saying I’d buy this machine Jon, I was just pointing out what Shuttle’s marketing strategy was.

To be honest Jon Lee, I don’t see a marketing strategy… on paper it looks impressive but if you know a little about this stuff, you quickly realize its shortcomings. People really into games KNOW their hardware and would probably pass or buy it just to show off. Regardless, if CrunchGear puts this up for next Fridays prize… I still got another wack of photo albums to scan - so I would go for it and sell the parts to buy a very high end laptop…. XPS 1710 sounds about right… maybe even splurge and get a keyword cover with it too ;-)

Jon

Ouch Josh, that price must sting… I really do wonder how companies like this actually turn a profit or manage to exist for more than a month…

I wonder if they got the ‘flaming case’ inspiration from themselves?

Isaiah:

I can imagine the guys at Shuttle building their first PC, complete with 4 video cards, 2 500gb hds, 16 gb of ram, and 2 Dual Core xtreme cpus, and then encasing it in a heatproof plastic with no vents or fans whatsoever.

“Sweet man! This is a sick machine.”
“I know it’s so 1337. I can’t wait to pwn some n00bies. Let’s turn it on.”
::turns PC on::
“Hey wait, what? Why it is on fire?!”
“Ahhhhh put it out, put it out!”

And this is why Shuttle is charging 3500+ per computer, to make up for the losses when their first computer caught fire…

Jon Lee:

The scary thing is that makes more sense than it should, but having worked on computers myself, I can see friends of mine going through that exact same scenario. :D

1337

Once used by the hacker community as sort of a sub-culture language, ANYONE using this type of speak in the present day and age is either:

A) A clueless net newbie who somehow thinks its still “cool” to speak this way.

B) A veteren net user who uses it to parody the type of people mentioned in example A.

Which are you?