Shuttle XPC SS51

Shuttle decided long ago that big PCs were a waste of space and its range of miniature XPCs have garnered praise from far and wide.

Unfortunately, their comparatively middling specifications have limited their appeal but with the new SS51 you can have all the power of a high-end desktop PC in a case the size of a shoebox.

Actually, you can have as much or as little power as you like in the SS51 since it's not sold as a complete PC. Instead, you get a 'bare bones' system that provides everything you need except a processor, memory and disk drives.

On the downside, this means you have to buy and fit these components yourself. On the upside, you can pick and choose ones to suit or even re-use some.

Once out of the box, the SS51 looks like no PC you've ever seen. It measures a mere 200 x 181 x 280mm and the brushed aluminium case makes it extremely light. It's stylish too but then it isn't beige or the size of a small bookcase.

Remove the case and the inside of the SS51 is a marvel of engineering. The tiny motherboard has everything you could possibly need built in.

A total of one network, three FireWire, four USB 2, two serial and two PS/2 slots adorn the front and back of the case in various combinations, plus there's on-board AGP graphics and six-channel audio with optical in and out sockets. There's no parallel port but with most printers now connecting via USB, you really won't miss it.

As you might guess, the inside of the SS51 is pretty cramped but the cunning modular design makes fitting the necessary components simple. The chassis unscrews to provide easy access to everything and following the clear, illustrated step-by-step manual at a leisurely pace, we had a working PC in under an hour.

Better still, all of the necessary cables, screws, sticky pads and cable ties are supplied, so all you need is a screwdriver and a bit of confidence. The final step is installing an operating system and Windows XP Home costs £81 for an upgrade, £163 for the full product.

With the SS51 up and running, the most striking thing is how quiet it is. Instead of a traditionally noisy processor cooler, the SS51 uses a clever 'heat pipe' design to keep the processor cool and this uses an ultra-quiet low-speed fan. Unless you fit a noisy hard disk or CD-Rom drive, you'll be hard-pressed to hear that this PC is actually running.

We filled two of the three SS51's drive bays with a 30GB hard disk (£60) and a CD-RW drive (£60), leaving the floppy drive bay unused. Then we added 256MB of super-fast Crucial DDR memory (£60) and an Intel Pentium 4 2.54GHz processor, resulting in a top-flight PC.

Unfortunately, that £620 processor results in a top-flight price but if you opt for a 2.26GHz Pentium 4 at £235, these extras come to £415. Alternatively, a 1.7GHz costs just £83.

The price of the SS51 itself has yet to be fixed, since we received one of the first models to reach the UK. After speaking to suppliers though, a price of around £280 looks very likely.

The good news is that despite its diminutive size, the SS51 performs just as well as any other PC with the same specification (the same processor, in other words).

The on-board AGP graphics are less impressive but are fine for Windows applications and DVD movies. If you fancy playing games, don't worry - the SS51 has one free PCI slot and an AGP slot, so you can fit the latest, greatest graphics card for truly spectacular gaming performance.

DETAILS
Price: Around £280

Contact: Gemma Computers 020 8961 7008
www.shuttleonline.com