Small form-factor PC pioneer Shuttle is to unveil a new computer casing design next month, the Taiwanese firm said today. It's keeping mum about the design's finer points, but it did claim the new look will shrink its Shuttle XPC range "even smaller and even more quiet" - the better to put them in living rooms.

"We introduced the world's first small form-factor PC five years ago," Shuttle head of marketing in Europe Melanie Liu said. "The time to set another milestone has arrived."

Shuttle's current XPC line up isn't exactly tiny - they're much larger than Apple's Mac Mini and AOpen's Mac Mini-like "Mini PC", for example - so there's room, as it were, for Shuttle to compact its cases even further.

The company already offers a slimline, DVD player-like casing - its XPC M1000 - for Media Center Edition systems. It measures 44.2 x 35 x 7.8cm, and is based on Intel's notebook-oriented processors and chipsets.

Shuttle said it will show off the new form-factor at CeBIT, which runs from March 9 to 15 in Hannover, Germany. ®