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.
The Sato uses a Shuttle XPC case, and as far as multimedia PCs go, few can match the features and svelte look of the Shuttle cases. Shuttle pioneered the Small Form Factor (SFF) and few have bettered their approach. The XPC with its clean lines and slabs of brushed aluminium makes the Sato a truly good looking machine - whether for a study or nestled into the lounge room.
There is only one weak point with the XPC case though. The DVD-RW is hidden behind a smart flap, but when the DVD drive opens it blocks the lower flap containing the I/O ports - preventing it from opening. This is unlikely to be a problem during normal use, but is still a potential issue if you’re using the memory reader in conjunction with the DVD writer. As far as ins and outs go, it has the bases covered, with VGA, 2x firewire, 5xUSB, and a memory card reader. It will also do TV-out, S-video and composite, which helps get the most out of the onboard tuner.
Inside, the Sato is very compact - as expected from a SFF - and due to the single PCI slot being used by the tuner card the upgradeability is very limited. There is an extra memory slot and two extra SATA ports that make some upgrading possible. Being based on a SFF means effective heat dissipation is a major requirement – especially considering the considerable heat output of the Pentium 4 CPU. Luckily, the cooling is ably handled by the Shuttle ICE system, which, due to its series of heatpipes, also keeps the unit fairly quiet.
As a multimedia unit, the Sato shines. Seeing as it is based on the MCE OS, the PC comes with a Windows MCE remote and receiver. And MCE is powerful enough that most media functions can be performed from within the MCE shell, just by using the remote. The only disappointment, and this is due to the small factor, is the provision of onboard AC’97 sound only. This format is know 7 years old and cannot compete with dedicated cards like Creative’s Audigy offerings.
Graphically, the X600 does a good job of supplying high frame rates for games and clear 2D graphics. Coupled with this, the supplied Samsung SyncMaster 172x LCD screen will then display games and DVDs clearly with no perceptible blur - due to its very low 12ms pixel response time. This gamer’s dream monitor. Completing the media bonanza, then, is the the Pioneer DVR-108 DVD-ROM, which will handle most DVD reading and burning duties - including dual-layer DVDs and fast 16x single-layer writes.
SATO put all the other PCs out of their misery by firmly cementing itself into first place after only PCMark04 testing. Whilst the margin was less than 100 overall points between it and the Pioneer, it produced a magnificent 4637 marks, one of the highest scoring machines to come through our Labs and second only to Modtech's Civic 3200.dX system which took out our coveted Labs winner award in May this year.
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The Capitol Dream Station housing freatures adequate cooling and plenty of ins and outs at the rear of the device. |
This beefy performance comes care of Capitol's choice of using an Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz CPU with 1MB of L2 cache and SSE2 and SSE3 optimisations. This particular component gives the Sato a real advantage in a multimedia intensive benchmark such as PCMark04, with its dependence on media encoding and decoding on the fly.
While the SATO dropped a few places back to fourth during 3DMark01SE testing in the default 1024 x 768 resolution, it was clear this machine was a stayer, keeping its place across all three tests and pushing ahead in the real-world gaming by jumping into third and returning an average 20.6 frames per second. This is enough for a good experience in even the latest DirectX 9 games – which are known to be particularly taxing on both the CPU load and GPU capabilities.
The software extras are not much to crow about though, with only cutdown versions of PowerDVD XP and Nero Express included.
Value for money is something that always comes to mind with this machine, and the Sato is a very good PC for the cash. It boasts excellent multimedia functions (thanks in part to its integration with MCE), a good peripheral bundle including a great LCD, and will also slap most games well and truly upside the head.
The XPC is an attractive SFF which won't require upgrading any time soon. It combines a set of well thought out and powerful components with the simplicity of Windows Media Center, making this a very deserving Labs Winner.