fudzilla.com/index.php?optio … &Itemid=35 - October 19th
The Q8200, Q6600, E7300, E2220 and E2200 are all set to drop and the E7400 will launch
fudzilla.com/index.php?optio … &Itemid=35 - November 30th
Q8300, E5300 and Celeron E1500 launch
With regards to the 4GB limit, Windows XP is limited to 3-3.5GB, but Vista can do 4GB - msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx
So ok, you got a bit of a point there, but you’ll most likely get slightly worse performance going for 3x1GB than 4x1GB or 2x2GB, but I guess you could go with 2x1GB and 2x512MB, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
And with regards to Shuttle, well, we’ll see, but if you look at all their “new” products, they’re pretty much re-hashing old stuff, their “latest” model is a cut-down version of their last P35 model and the rest of their line up consists of Atom based machines, anyone interested? Besides, they’re over priced and their R&D is really slow and they’ve lost most of their good staff, which to me sounds like they’re not going to be around for too much longer. I thought they would’ve pull the plug this year just like Abit is about to do, but I guess there’s still enough market for them somewhere in the world.
There are no other small form factor makers any more, as you can’t survive by selling 1,000 units or less a month. It was a fad and it was over two or even three years ago when everyone except Shuttle pulled out. Over the past two years Shuttle hasn’t really been doing too well and they’ve restructured part of their business and seem to be trying to branch out with weird surveillance PCs and a bunch of other low power/noise solutions that are over priced and under specified.
These days you either go mini-ITX and I almost dare not say, but Intel has a really sweet board intel.com/products/desktop/m … erview.htm although you can’t fit a graphics card to it, but since it takes Core 2 Duo processors, two sticks of DDR2 memory and has a PCIe x1 slot as well as DVI and HDMI output, it looks like a really sweet HTPC board, or you go mATX and there’s a whole bunch of great mATX boards out there now.
If you’re an AMD fan, then there’s this bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/0 … herboard/1 which has a full x16 PCIe slot, but the downside apart from the CPU is the fact that it has two SO-DIMM slots (laptop memory). Also mini-ITX cases are still quite expensive and you won’t find that many with a spare expansion slot.
I was hoping for AMD’s DTX standard as it allowed for two slots, but it never took off so I guess that’s not going to happen. Apart from that there isn’t much choice when it comes to smaller systems, but maybe there will be some changes at Shuttle before they’re gone, or someone else will take over that market space. Personally I miss the Biostar iDEQ systems, much better than Shuttle ever was imho.