The Shuttle SS40G XPC Mini System features Shuttle's own Spacewalker FS40 Motherboard. The Spacewalker features the 740 chipset from SiS, and thus supports all current Athlon XP processors, including the new Thoroughbred chips. Unusually for a micro ATX board, it supports DDR SDRAM allowing users to unlock the full potential of AMD's latest and greatest. The 740 also features a plethora of other very handy features that the Shuttle XPC takes full advantage of to give all of the functionality of a full ATX motherboard PC in a micro ATX format. One of the more impressive amongst these is an integrated video solution you can actually use to play games.
The integrated GPU features a medium performance 3D accelerator with 2 Pixel / 4 Texture and Geometry Transform/lighting engines, and a 128 bit 2D accelerator with 1T pipeline BITBLT engine. It also features high quality DVD decoding. The SiS 301 Video Bridge integrates an NTSL/PAL video encoder with Macro Vision Ver. 7.1.L1 option for TV display. The primary CRT display and the extended secondary display (in the spacewalkers case, TV-out) features a Dual View capability in the sense that both can generate the display in independent resolutions, colour depths, and frame rates.
One area of the SiS 740 the Shuttle does thankfully not take advantage of is its integrated audio. Instead they have opted for the CMI 8738 chipset, as featured in numerous Soyo’s on-board sound, as well as numerous professional quality soundcards from Hercules, and has gained it's foothold as the de-facto standard in high quality on-board sound. It supports 5.1 surround sound speakers, DLS wave table music and a professional class optical I/O digital interface. Gamers are well catered for with both Direct Sound 3D & A3D support, and sound is comparable to top of the line standalone cards from Creative.
The Spacewalker's integrated network adaptor is provided by a Realtek 8100B controller. Sandra Network benchmarks put it right up there with the best 100MB/s NICs on the market in terms of speed, and the fact that it has a hardware IRQ reserved in the BIOS minimises the chance that it will conflict with any PCI cards you should want to install.
Although the Shuttle Minisystem is USB 2.0 ready, it is NOT provided natively by the motherboard. The two ports on the motherboard itself, and also therefore the two on the front are actually just USB 1.1. Shuttle have included a VIA VT6202 USB2.0 controller as a standalone PCI card, allowing external hard disks and writers to be used at their maximum speed (USB 2.0 can transfer 400MB+/s under optimal conditions). Hopefully they will fix this in future revisions as one of the PCI slots are used if you need USB 2.0.
IEEE 1394a, commonly known as FireWire was, before USB 2.0, the premiere choice for transferring data at high speeds between external peripherals and a PC. The Shuttle XPC minisystem features three fully compliant cable ports, supporting 400Mb/s, 200Mb/s, 100Mb/s data transfer rate. This is provided by its integrated Lucent FW323 controller.
