Shuttle releases a heck of a payload

THIS VERY sexy looking box makes me think of the movie Aladdin, where the genie says "All the power in the universe, in an itty bitty living space".

In the rather inconspicuous looking box is the tiny little Shuttle, a power cable and a box of bits and bobs that contains a quick start manual, 3 CDs which have titles that have no bearing on their contents, two 3.25-inch inch floppy disks for the RAID drivers - although there is no drive in the unit.

There is also an assortment of other cables, such as S-ATA, IDE and power converter cables. Lastly there are two small feet that can be used to raise up the front.

Inside the sleek little box is a jaw dropping spec sheet. There is an Intel i975X motherboard packing a Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU running at 2.93 GHz, 4GB of DDR 2 SDRAM, an Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 dual GPU graphics card, a 400GB S-ATA HDD and a 16x DVD Writer.

The front of the box lets you access the DVD Drive as well as two USB ports, a mini Firewire port and headphone and microphone jacks, all placed discretely behind sleek black panels. Around the back you'll find two DVI connectors, six USB ports, one Firewire port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, five analogue audio jacks as well as SPDIF Optical in and out and SPDIF Coaxial output. There is also a S-ATA port for connecting an external SATA drive and a small recessed button to clear the CMOS.

As much as I like the small innocuous design it is worth noting that, due to the design of the three silver buttons on the front, more than once I accidentally shut down the machine while trying to retract the DVD Drive.

It should be said up front, this machine is not aimed at PC enthusiasts who want to continually upgrade, constantly fiddling inside the case would be a nightmare and I don't think it would be long before something broke while trying to fiddle around the rather small confines of the chassis. Similarly, I would strongly advise against overclocking, not because the hardware isn't capable of it, but because the whole unit gets warm enough in there at the stock settings, overclocking seems to make the whole thing rather unstable.

With this kind of spec sheet, you shouldn't need to overclock or upgrade anytime soon anyway. It all looks good on paper and I'm happy to report it all translates to superb performance in real life. 3DMark05 scores nearly 14000 3DMarks at the default settings and just shy of 11000 marks at a resolution of 1280x1024 with 4x AA and Anisotropic Filtering. Multitasking is a breeze, even crunching several intensive apps it barely breaks a sweat. Games also run superbly well. With the settings cranked up to the max, Far Cry runs at an average of 160 FPS across four demo levels, with the absolute minimum being 84 FPS. Half-Life 2, Doom 3 and other games show equally impressive results, running smoothly with all the settings maxed out.

So, you have a PC that would look as perfectly in place in your lounge as it would in your study. It's powerful and can bend it's will to any task, be it a gaming machine, an HTPC or business powerhouse. But here comes here the bad news, it costs around £2000, and that's before tax, before the big monitor you'll want to connect to it and before any other peripherals you'll want to add, like surround sound, keyboard, mouse and so on. You get a two-year collect-and-return warranty in the box so at least you can rest assured your precious is covered if the worst should happen.

Fortunately, if your pockets aren't that deep, because the P2 3700G is based on Shuttle's XPC Barebone SD37P2 chassis there is a choice of lesser CPUs, GPUs, HDDs and memory, pushing the price down to a baseline to just under £800.

Conclusion
Most of you are probably thinking that this is overpriced and that you could get a similar machine for significantly less money, and you would be right. But, this is aimed squarely at someone who wants high performance and convenience and doesn't mind paying something extra for that convenience. The whole experience is marvellously simple, you take the unit of its box, you plug it in and it works, not just works, but works well, and if by some tragedy it stops working, someone will come round and make it better.

L'INQ
Shuttle XPC P2 3700G