Shuttle’s SG45H7 bigged up

SMALL BUT  powerful PCs using mATX motherboards have slowly disappeared over the last five years, partly giving way to gaming laptops and bespoke media streamers and media centres.

Shuttle's SG45H7 is an example of an old-fashioned, small-format PC standing less than 20cm tall that can do media centre and regular desktop PC work.

The sleek, all-black cocktail includes an Intel G45-based-proprietary-sized motherboard, with GMA integrated graphics, a 300W power supply, a CPU heatsink and fan and scaffolding for an optical drive and two 3.25-inch devices. Its small stature doesn't affect its long feature list, which includes a full-sized PCI Express 2.0 slot, a PCI slot, four DDR2 slots and heaps of ports. Inserting components is easy to do with the exception of adding a discrete graphics card, which becomes a difficult squeeze.

There's no denying the SG45H7 is pricey compared with desktop equivalents, but Shuttle gets away with it because it more or less has a monopoly on compact barebones after Asus, Biostar, Antec and Aopen all moved away from the market.

To benchmark, we pitted the SG45H7 against last year's Shuttle SX38P2 Pro barebones, which was, back then, the highest performing Shuttle. Like pitting a parkinson's-riddled Mohammed Ali against his pro-boxer daughter, this isn't a totally fair fight; one was once a prize fighter, the other wasn't designed to pack the same punch. Still, it does show us whether Intel has made much progress with its Penryn-enable chipsets and whether Shuttle itself has improved over the last year.

Benchmarking setup

Windows Vista Ultimate Service Pack 1

Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 2.66GHz

Corsair CM2X1024-10000C5D 2GB DDR2 1,250MHz @ 800MHz with 5-5-5-18 timings

WD Raptor 10,000rpm 150GB

15.11.4.1591 drivers for Intel GMA X4500HD

Catalyst 8.11 drivers for Radeon HD 3850 256MB DDR3 and Radeon 3450 256MB DDR2

Forceware 178.24 drivers for Geforce 8400 GS 256MB DDR2

There are no significant performance differences between the older X38 chipset, which the SX38P2 Pro uses, and the newer G45 one here. Had we let each system run our high performing 1,250MHz-rated Corsair DDR2 Ram as high as possible, then the X38 Shuttle would have whizzed ahead of the G45 Shuttle because the latter can't handle Ram quicker than 800MHz. The SG45H7's Bios restricts Ram frequencies to five fixed multipliers of the front side bus, so higher end PCs, like the Shuttle X38 or X48, are more suitable for 1,066MHz+ Dimms.

The G45 Shuttle excels beyond the margin of error in our gaming benchmarks - although only fractionally. We weren't expecting any real difference since both the X38 and G45 sport a x16 PCI Express 2.0 slot, but Intel has obviously made slight tweaks to the newer chipset.

It's also clear that Intel's GMA X4500HD graphics are a significant improvement over its X3100 series. Not only is it the first Intel IGP we've been able to watch a Blu-ray with, it's also capable of playing the four-year old Far Cry at a decent frame rate, just not as quickly as AMD's and Nvidia's slowest discrete GPUs.

The SG45H7 has an admirably low idle power draw and it's also much quieter than the X38 Shuttle, thanks to the former using just one system fan. Shuttle's puny 300W power supply (rated at a tree-hugging 80 per cent plus efficient) coped well during gaming when we ramped up the power by fitting a Core 2 Extreme 9650 overclocked to 3.3GHz and a Radeon HD 4850 graphics card. Those are the fastest components it can handle since the FSB won't stretch to 1,600MHz and there's only one six pin PCI Express power adapter so most double-width graphics cards are a no no.

On a personal note, this is the 11th Shuttle your reviewer has tested over the last two years and all have great build quality. Some are flawed because they are built for AMD processors which have been naff these last two years. Others pack features that are inappropriate for the small form factor, like dual-graphics card arrangements. Many are simply too underpowered or expensive. The SG45H7, however, strikes a very good balance between features, cooling ability and size and as such is one of the best out of the Shuttle cartel.

The Good Excellent construction, quiet, frugal

The Bad Not suitable for dual-slot graphics cards

The Ugly Rubbish memory frequency control

Bartender's verdict