Digital Home Thoughts: Shuttle Unleashes Intel Core i7-based Barebones XPC, The SX58H7

"Just when you think you've got it all in a PC platform. Shuttle gives you more! The Shuttle SX58H7 Pro Station packs amazing performance into a mini glossy aluminum enclosure to reach "work hard and play hard" goals of extreme gamers, demand enthusiasts and mainstream PC users."

This is the Shuttle I've been waiting for. I've been wanting to build an Intel Core i7-based system since I saw the first monstrously awesome benchmarks for the Core i7 line of CPUs. I do quite a bit of video editing, and rendering out a final 720p or 1080p file takes forever, so I welcome any technology that will speed that process up. Four cores, each hyper-threaded? That's just...awesome. At any rate, I have limited space for my media editing computer, so I was looking to another Shuttle to replace this one. The SX58H7 features the Intel X58 Express Chipset, has a power supply fan that's 5cm bigger (which should mean better airflow and lower RPMs), supports ATI's CrossFireX or NVIDIA's SLI for dual video cards, and has four RAM slots - but you'd only want to fill up three of those in order to get maximum performance from triple-channel RAM.

The only two down sides to this unit? The price for one. At $599, you're definitely paying a premium when you consider that this is a case, a motherboard, and a power supply - all three of which you could probably get for $400 or less. You're paying a premium for getting everything in this small package, but in our current economy, that might not fly. The second down-side for me personally is that I'll be going from having three hard drives in my SD39P2 down to one hard drive. I really appreciate having the wicked-fast Raptor X drive as my main hard drive, yet still having the security of knowing all my un-processed photos and videos are secure on a RAID 1 array with two 500 GB Western Digital RE2 drives. Having to give that up and go back to having only one hard drive would be frustrating...but probably something I'm willing to do given how badly I want a Core i7 system!