Shuttle design chief blasts lack of industry innovation

Shuttle’s lead designer has blasted rivals in the industry for not putting enough thought and innovation into their PC designs, saying all they think about is cost and not the environment in which a PC will be used.

Ken Huang, vice president of the system development department at Shuttle, said companies were all coming out with the same products running the same specifications.

“We design the Porsche for the PC. We’d like to see competitors being more innovative. I’m feeling very lonely. For a few years now companies copy our ideas.”

Shuttle has a strong reputation for building well-designed, and often ground breaking, systems. It is best known for its small form factor case, typically sold as a barebone PCs, and has introduction several new looks on this theme.

Huang, who is passionate about PC design, said: “Companies only think in one way: cost. They don’t consider materials, noise, and good design. The whole PC area is always looking at price, price, price and afterwards you find they are dead, dead, dead.”

He pointed to the many design differences in hifis, and said he believed companies should concentrate more on building high quality systems with good components and air flow that enables systems to run cool and quiet. Particularly as so many computers are now used as entertainment systems.

At Computex , Shuttle is showing a couple of products that were first announced at Cebit in Germany in March, but will be available over the next couple of months.

The most eye-catching is its ultra-low profile X100 system, which mixes desktop and notebook components. About the same length as Shuttle’s typical small form factor cases, it is only 5cm high but can still be easily dismantled to change internal components.

Coming out next month, and costing about $1,000 (depending on specifications), it runs Intel’s 1.85GHz dual core mobile processor, ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 graphics and 256MB of DDR2 notebook memory. But it uses a 3.5” 250GB desktop Sata hard drive, which is mounted on the base of the case.

Huang said that even though Intel is bringing out more energy efficient processors in the near future, Shuttle will continue to use the mobile version because when combined with the chipset, they still use less power, and therefore run quieter.

Its new SS31T tower case is a hybrid BTX and ATX system. Shuttle brought out its first SFF BTX a couple of years ago, but it ran very hot and was discontinued.

The latest mixes the two systems to improve airflow over the components. It’s the same length as other Shuttle SFF cases, but about 1.5 times as high, so still small compared to other towers.

Its size means it can use standard components, so it will sell for less than a usual Shuttle case, and depending on the graphics and processor, can handle a power supply up to 700w.

Finally, it also has some traditional looking SFF systems coming out, based on AMD and Intel CPUs. The AMD XPCSN27P2 uses Nvidia’s Nforce 570 chipset and will run the Geforce 7950 GX2 graphics card. The Intel-based XPCSD37P2 uses the 975X chipset, has two hard disks and DDR2 memory.

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