Gamers Evolved

First there were videos, than there were DVDs, than came HD, and finally there is Blu-Ray. For anyone who is not yet familiar with the Blu-ray Disc it is a next-generation optical disc format meant for high definition video (HD) and high density data storage, and is one of two competing standards for HD optical media.

Shuttle inc. has taken the advances of Blu-Ray one step further and created a small form factor(SFF) PC that has the fuction of Blu-Ray playback.

The new Shuttle XPC G5 3201M is the first SSF PC media centre system that is equipped with a Blu-ray drive, enabling it to play the latest HD-format cinema films. The increased performance, necessary to achieve this, comes in the form of Core 2 series processors, up to 4 GB of RAM, and a NVIDIA GeForce 8600GTS graphics card with accelerator functions.

But that isn’t all that it is capable of. It can support HDCP copy protection media, through DVI and HDMI. This gives you the comfort of getting an easy and smooth connection with moder flat screen displays. The graphics card is also something to be amazed with. It has the ability to give you big picture format from your PC games onto your home TV.

As is to be expected this new product is based off of the new Windows Vista Home Premium. What computer wouldn’t have Microsoft? Shuttle chose this particular version because it is equipped with an integrated media centre software. There is a remote that comes with the product, making it easy for anyone(i.e. people who don’t know anything about electronics)to navigate around. And if that doesn’t always work for people they also have a VFD display in the front panel that lets you know what is going on the entire time.

We don’t usually see many advance products for computers(except for software)so it is nice to finally see something that anyone can use in their home and on their PC. Hopefully we will see much more advances in this field.