The fever of Intel Core 2 Extreme series of compliant systems finally stopped, at least for a short while. But another one emerged - the counterstrike of the AMD Alliance that has just rolled out a new mini -PC for the Athlon AM2 processors, which are almost as new as Intel's line-up.

More precisely, Shuttle released the XPC SN27P2, a little PC that has been developed in a different manner from the other common platforms which are based on 'traditional' DDR memory. Therefore, Shuttle's latest PC also features support for the DDR2 RAM, and a motherboard with AM2 socket and DDR2 memory slots.

In addition, the SN27P2 comes with an I/O panel, numerous audio, USB and Firewall ports, an external SATA connector (in red) and a 5.25" drive bay. It appears that the middle panel door sports a 3.5" bay where you could integrate a so trendy memory card reader or 'a traditional' floppy drive.

But let's see the latest Intel Alliance achievement delivered by Alienware which has just rolled out two new desktop workstations - the Area-51 7500 and Area-51 ALX that feature the new Intel Core 2 Extreme and Intel Core 2 Duo processors, but also other new notebooks - the Area-51 m5750 and Area-51 m5550, which will be powered by the new Intel Core 2 Duo mobile processor.

Specs
(Manufacturer's Details)

NVIDIA nForce 4 - 570 Ultra
AMD Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64 X2 or Sempron
AM2
1000 MHz
DDR2 Dual Channel 667 / 800
4 DIMM slots, maximum 4 GB of RAM
3 x SATA / 1 x IDE / 1 x SATA external
1 x Gigabit Ethernet
7.1 High Definition Audio