The Pentium-M is a great CPU. It performs very well and runs quite cool which is why it’s the most popular notebook CPU at the moment. However, showing the performance aspect of such a CPU is very hard in a notebook as you’re generally stuck with slower components such as Video cards and hard drives. In fact, we had always wondered why we never saw a SFF PC based on the Pentium-M and Shuttle has done just that with their SD11.

We played around with a pre-production sample during the GITEX computer exhibition held in Dubai a couple of weeks ago and while the unit was as good as a retail sample that Shuttle will be shipping in the upcoming weeks, it did not have the packaging with it. We’re guessing that you’ll probably see it in the standard shuttle box. As you can see from the picture above, the SD11 looks identical to the nForce3 based XPC except its white instead of black and while the white looks alright, we prefer black or grey. There are two accessable drive bays on the front- one 5 ¼ and the other 3 ½ and both are hidden to create a nice uniform look. At the bottom, you have front audio, one Firewire and two USB ports- again hidden like the usual XPC style.

Features

Based on the 915GM+ICH6M chipset, the SD11 supports almost all of the new technologies such as SATA, DDR2 for which Shuttle provides two slots and PCI Express which is provided in the form of one x16 slot and another x1 slot. Since this is a G version of the chipset, you have onboard video in the form of Intel GMA 900 and Shuttle does good by not only providing DSUB and DVI connections, but an S-Video output port as well allowing you to connect the XPC directly to the TV.

For audio, Shuttle uses Creative's SB Live! 24 bit onboard audio solution providing 7.1 output with SPDIF connectivity which is much better than your standard AC97 codec. A Broadcom Gigabit LAN is also provided along with Firewire support through a VIA controller. Laslty, we also see an internal mini PCI slot that can be used to connect Intel WiFi cards found in most notebooks.