With the wave of compact ultra-low power hardware flooding onto the market, mini PCs such as Intel’s NUC and Compute Stick, MSI’s Cubi, Lenovo’s Stick 300, Android mini-PCs, and more have proliferated. Shuttle has been working in this market for several years now, and now the company has extended its product line up with the XPC Nano series.
The XPC Nano is designed to be one of Shuttle’s smallest mini PCs to date, measuring 29 mm wide, and with a total volume of 0.5 liters. Shuttle opted to use Intel’s Broadwell processors inside of these systems instead of the newer Skylake CPUs. Shuttle didn’t say why it did this, but it is likely in part to help keep the total system cost down.
Shuttle said that there will be multiple models in the XPC Nano series, with processors ranging from low-end Celeron units to high-end Core i7s. All of these systems will use Intel’s integrated graphics solutions. The XPC Nano devices will use the more compact SO-DIMMs, with support for up to 16 GB of DDR3L in a dual-channel configuration.
For connectivity options, there will be an M.2 connector for an SSD in addition to a conventional 2.5-inch drive slot. As these are designed to be compact systems, HDDs or SSDs used in the XPC Nano cannot be thicker than 7 mm. The system will also support a number of other connections, including mini-DisplayPort, HDMI, USB 3.0, USB 2.0, RS-232, audio jacks, and an RJ45 port powered by an Intel gigabit Ethernet controller. (Shuttle didn’t state how many ports would be on the system, however, just that all of these types of connections would be present.)
These systems will primarily be sold as barebones kits, but Shuttle plans to release the XPC Nano NC01UWIN10HE system, which will be a complete ready to use system with Windows 10 Home Edition pre-installed, during this holiday season.
There is no word on pricing or availability for the barebones XPC Nanos, but the XPC Nano NC01UWIN10HE will have a starting price of $279.
