More Details on Shuttle’s Upcoming MCE-01 Set-Top PC

By Thomas Hawk | March 22nd, 2005

Wow! Is she ever beautiful! I’m drooling. This is one sexy piece of ass, I mean hardware. Tech Connect Magazine is out with more details on the new Shuttle Media Center PC scheduled for release later this year. Apparently they are now calling the thing MCE-01 (some genius in marketing no doubt).

The Shuttle MCE-01 has an extremely nice form factor as well as quiet but significant power. The unit is powered by the Intel 915M chipset which are usually manufactured for notebooks. The key here is quiet.

The unit runs a ATI x300 graphics card, includes a 7.1 Dolby Surround Sound card, a wireless LAN card and even an FM tuner (no word on how these FM broadcasts would interface with MCE, I doubt they will but it would be hot if they did).

The design also features a dual internal/external drive combo scenario. The idea here is portability and it is a good one. Personally I think an external USB 2 Maxtor or a laptop on the LAN works just as well for me but I could see where it might be nice to have an all in one unit with easy external portability.

The remote looks pretty plain vanilla. Personally I’m looking for some of these high end systems to come out with better remotes. Niveus has a new Pocket PC remote that looks pretty cool. What would be really cool though would be an RF remote that could be used anywhere in the house that also served as a wireless phone.

You might remember the last time that we saw more details on this upcoming offering from Shuttle was back over at Anandtech’s site when they picked it up as part of their CES coverage. Personally I liked the name Sonoma better than MCE-01 but, hey, that’s just me.

One thing that is noticeably missing from this new promotion piece over at TechConnect is the HDTV CableCARD slot that Anandtech reported on back in January. Very noticeably absent actually. I’m not sure if Shuttle is still planning on offering a CableCARD slot with this new PC but it did appear in the original prototype and I’m not sure why it’s not mentioned in the TechConnect piece.

Obviously the extra year extension for the implementation of an FCC CableCARD mandate may have impacted this product feature. If someone has any clarification on this aspect as well as what Microsoft might have planned for HDTV in the MCE 2005 update I’d love to hear about it.

Thanks, Kevin and Bridget!

* Side note: Why no mention of the CableCARD slot in the updated promo piece on the new Shuttle Media Center PC? Anandtech reported on it and included this prototype photo in January from CES and now there appears no mention of it in the latest TechConnect article, let alone a photo. What gives?