The concept of fitting normal PC hardware into a tiny package has been proven to work and small form factor (SFF) systems are now commonplace.

Noise levels and heat dissipation are two important factors in the design of small form factor (SFF) PCs. Low noise is particularly important in the growing home theatre PC market, where designs such as the Soltek EQ3801 are increasingly popular due their attractively small size.

Shuttle's SB95P is a small form factor (SFF) aimed at the enthusiast/gamer market, and it takes advantage of the i925 iteration of PCI-E. Though Shuttle are known for their XPC’s striking looks, in this case the colour scheme is nothing to write home about: is gun-metal anyone's favourite colour?

Nominating Sato as our winner for the desktop machines this month was fairly straightforward, especially when compared to deciding the outcome of the closely-fought notebook war. Because, even though the Sato was outdone by one or two systems in terms of performance, nothing beat it on pure value for money.

This is one nice looking white plastic and aluminium barebones system, with smooth lines and compact minimalism. Being a SFF PC makes ventilation vital, and the Kloss is built from the new BTX standard, which was designed with thermal effectiveness in mind.

Attractively small and aggressively priced, the Ultra Slim is an interesting proposition for businesses

Small form factor (SFF) PCs now have their foot well and truly in the home entertainment and IT/CE crossover market due largely to their aesthetics, functionality and quietness of operating volume. Westan's Biostar product looks to continue along these lines, offering a multimedia PC with all the performance of AMD's 64-bit desktop processor architecture.

The Shuttle XPC is an icon of SFF design, and there are as many iterations as there are chipsets.

FIC's Condor has answered the call this month, offering gamers an easy to upgrade system, wrapped up in a one of the most innovative cases we've seen.

Superior GPU needed for OSX 10.6

A solid, general-purpose pedestal server with good storage and a classy management act – plus it’s quiet as a mouse