Shuttle has been making small PCs for some time, and can virtually be credited with starting the small form factor (SFF) market. The company creates products as complete units or in a barebones format; the latter means only the case, motherboard and some accessories are included. Critical components like the CPU and memory are not supplied in the barebones price, but can be added as options, of course.

While the small form factor size has obvious space and transportation advantages, SFF PCs face several obstacles that are not seen in larger systems: some notable issues are ensuring effective cooling, finding a good power supply, and dealing with a lack of internal space for components. These obstacles commonly get in the way of high performance computing, and are particularly unfortunate for gamers, since SFF PCs are an ideal size for transporting to LAN parties.

Shuttle has created the SX38P2 in an effort to unite the SFF PC with high performance, and show how powerful an XPC system can truly be.