Shuttle M1000

If anyone’s going to make a PC that’s stylish enough to sit in your lounge, it’s Shuttle. More famous for its small form factor barebones PCs, Shuttle has launched the M1000 PC.

The glossy black case and slimline design combine to create a truly mouth-watering system – unmistakably Shuttle. Our only complaint is that the green LED looks a little dated – a full-on LCD screen would have made it look so much better.

But there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s still one of the best-looking Media Center PCs money can buy. Since a Media Center PC is designed to sit in a lounge environment, it is vitally important to limit the amount of noise it makes. Shuttle has taken this matter seriously and opted for a Pentium M processor.

Previously only found in notebooks, the Pentium M runs far cooler than standard desktop processors. You might get a shock when you first turn on the M1000, as you’re greeted with what sounds like a plane taking off. However, after a couple of seconds it calms down and is barely audible from then on. You certainly wouldn’t be able to hear it whirring away while watching a film or listening to music.

The downside of the Pentium M processor, especially the 1.73GHz model here, is that it lacks the raw power of desktop CPUs. Shuttle also supplies just 512MB of memory to support the processor. Although neither the low processing power nor memory will be a problem as far as Media Center is concerned, it will hamper performance in the latest games and high-end applications.

But the M1000 is designed as a Media Center PC, not a high-end gaming system.Taking care of the tuning side of things are two separate Avermedia TV tuners. Our model had two analogue tuners but, if you live in a Freeview area, digital alternatives are available for the same price.

Shuttle could have saved space by opting for a single dual-tuner card and therefore opening up the opportunity to upgrade to four tuners (using two dual- tuner cards). Although Media Center doesn’t currently support more than two tuners in the UK, in the US it can handle four (two high definition and two standard tuners). When we eventually get high definition broadcasts you can expect Media Center to be updated appropriately.

That said, the two tuners used by Shuttle feature both hardware acceleration and onboard mpeg encoding, which reduces the load on the relatively slow mobile processor.

An Nvidia Geforce 6800LE graphics card with 256MB of Ram handles the graphics. This card will be able to run the latest games, though not at high resolution and detail settings.

Like the Pentium M processor, it will be perfectly adequate for Media Center applications.Various video outputs are provided and, if you’ve got a compatible TV, the component option will give you the best quality. Alternatively, S-video and composite are available along with DVI and VGA outputs. If you want to use Scart, you’ll need to buy a suitable converter (around £10).

Audio is taken care of by S/PDIF connectors (optical and coaxial) along with a 7.1 output. Microphone and headphone sockets are hidden behind a flap at the front, which also houses a multiformat memory card reader.

The 250GB 7,200rpm hard drive provides the bare minimum of storage space for a Media Center PC, but if you really get into the swing of recording video you will end up wanting more. To help you out, Shuttle has included a secondary storage option in the form of a front-loading 2.5in drive bay.

A USB caddy means the drive can be used just like a USB key – useful if you want to transfer video to and from the M1000 without getting bogged down with wireless streaming.