The core of SATOs SS51G is an incredibly tiny Shuttle XPC. These bare-bones boxes have been on the market for close to six months now, and have proven effective (if not over-whelming) performers and a very popular choice for building a lounge-room PC for playing music and DVD movies.

Make no mistake: the XPCs are fairly specialised pieces of equipment. All the XPCs (be they PIII, Athlon or P4) use custom-made SiS chipset motherboards. No other manufacturer has yet released a motherboard small enough to fit into this size case, although VIA had just announced one as we were going to print.

Its quite difficult to fit a full Pentium 4 system into such a small space, and Shuttle has been forced to take some rather novel approaches to solving the problem.The main CPU heatsink and fan (HSF), for example, dont sit directly on top of the processor.

Instead, the HSF is mounted on the back of the case. Several heatpipes draw out the excess thermal energy from a second, smaller heatsink above the processor, and then channel it back into the main HSF.

This particular model of XPC (the SS51G) uses the SiS 651 chipset and has been equipped with a Pentium 4 1.8GHz processor, 256MB PC2100 DDR RAM, 40GB HDD and a 40x CD-RW.

Having an extremely small chassis has both pros and cons. The pros are that it looks damn cool and doesnt take up a lot of space. The main con is that theres limited space inside the PC itself, making components hard to get to and limiting the upgrade potential. The XPC isnt really designed to be a performance beast like the Xenon system we tested this month (see page 45). Coupled with the P4 1.8GHz CPU and 256MB DDR, its benchmarks were satisfactory, but far from outstanding.

The Shuttle manages general office tasks reasonably well, and even did OK in multimedia creation (like video editing), but fell short in the area of 3D performance. This is hardly surprising, considering it uses SiS onboard graphics chip instead of a stand-alone AGP video card.

3D benchmark scores were roughly between 10-15% that of the Xenon at their fastest but then again, the Xenon contains a graphics card worth around $800 on its own. In general, 3D performance in the Shuttle was passable, although youre unlikely to be able to play any modern games unless you acquire a new graphics card.

The LCD is also merely average. Its generally decent, but suffers from a limited viewing angle (so the top and bottom of the
screen can look a little washed out, even when youre sitting right in front of the computer), but the colours on-screen are otherwise vibrant and imagery sharp at the default resolution of 1,024x768.

The most disappointing aspect of the Shuttle is that the $2,500 price tag doesnt include any form of operating system. If you add on the price of Windows XP Home, then the overall fee is bordering $2,700, which is getting costly considering that system performance is simply average. Overall, the Shuttle offers reasonable value for money for its size and spec. Its categorically one of the coolest looking and well-designed mini-PCs out there, but it falls short when it comes to performance.