Shuttle innovates
This is where all the Shuttle XPC chassis, which spawned countless imitations, were born, at Shuttle's HQ that looks more akin to a multi-storey car park than the cradle of innovation that, frankly, changed the way most of us view our PC.
Most Taiwanese companies' headquarters are centred wholly around business, with practically every square foot taken up by either offices or R+D area. Shuttle's approach, though, is more westernised in design.
Walking in through the plush entrance and you're assaulted by XPCs, lots and lots of them. We tried to point Shuttle to the error of its ways, hinting that the main X should be orange and not black, but there you go.
Various floors are divided into open-plan design, testing, sales, and management departments. The author's favourite was testing, where Shuttle engineers subject prototype XPCs and other small form-factor systems to all manner of tests, ensuring that the chassis are able to operate in every environment around the world. A non-air-conditioned room in Dubai to a freezing room in Alaska; all of that can be replicated by the walk-in-fridge-like machines you see in the above picture.
Part of the same testing room is devoted to the Man With The Wires, who can engineer any globally-used source voltage and add in spikes for additional load. It's his job, in the main, to ensure that the tiny SilentX PSUs are able to cope with, often, super-high-end equipment. Our recent review of the Shuttle P2 3700G highlighted that he's doing his job; the 400W model used in the SD37P2 was able to power an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800, NVIDIA GeForce 7950GX2, 4GiB DDR2 RAM with ease.
Moving on up through the building, we come to the area where new XPCs are designed.
Around the corner and in true Blue Peter style, here's some that Shuttle made earlier. See how geeky you are and how many you can name from the above picture in our guess the XPC thread in the HEXUS forums.
