Rich's Tongfamily (Richtong.net add-on)

a little ludwig goes a long way: Rich’s PC buying guide. No problem helping you figure out the Shuttle product line. I agree, it is incredibly confusing what to buy. Turns out they encode most of the important information into the product name (like most geeks), so you can figure it out if you understand what the designations are.
Here is the Shuttle decoder ring:
* The first letter S. It is always S for Shuttle I would bet.
* The second letter SN. This tells you the BIOS chipset vendor (OK, you can stop with the laughing). So for instance, if it is N that means it is an nVidia chipset. Of course geeks know that nVidia only does chipsets for AMD Athlons, so all names that start with “SN*” are for Athlons and are likely to be high performance.
* The second letter “SS”. This means the SiS chipset. They don’t use the SiS chipset much. It is for the Pentium. But it is the cheapest chipset around.
* The second letter “SK”. Refers to chipsets using the VIA series. These are mainly obsolete now, but there was the SK41 for the older VIA KM266 and the SK43 for the VIA KM400 chipsets.
* The second letter “SB”. This is for the Intel chipsets. Not sure why it is a B, but these are for the Intel chipsets.
* The next digit tells you what version of chipset you arle using, so SB6 means you are using the 865 chipset while SB7 tells you are using the more expensive 875 chipset.
* The final digit gives you a sub version of the chip, so SB62 for instance means the Intel 865G chipset (with integrated graphics) while the SB65 is the Intel 865PE.
* The final letter and optional digit tell you something about the chassis. The original chassis was G, the newer chassis sport a G2 for a later revision or G4 is the very latest chassis that has a SD card reader.
OK, so now you can decode:
* SK41G. This is a Shuttle, using the VIA _K_M chipset series. the 1 indicates, it was the first model, the VIA KM266. The G says it was the original chassis.
* SB65G2. This is a Shuttle using the Intel (_B_) chipset. It uses the 8_65_ chipset and the G2 chassis.
* SN85G4. This is a _S_huttle using the _N_Vidia chip nForce3 (_8_) chipset and it uses the G4 chassis.