The Shuttle XPC is an icon of SFF design, and there are as many iterations as there are chipsets. The latest, the ST20G5, is based on the new ATI Xpress 200 chipset, which is designed for the Athlon 64.
 
Unlike some recent XPC’s, this is not an enthusiast machine. Instead, it caters for the mainstream user, which can not only play games but also suits a variety of environments.
 
This flexibility is partly due to the fact that it’s a very silent case. Apart from the ‘whoosh’ on startup, you’ll barely know it’s there. The Smart Fan is temperature controlled and will only ramp up the cooling under extreme conditions. It’s a quiet and cool case – cool in both senses of the word – and is perhaps the loveliest case Shuttle has produced so far.
 
There is only a single IDE slot, which means playing with drive jumpers if you want to install more than just a CD-ROM.
 
The Xpress chipset is based on X300 graphics, and unsurprisingly it’s lacking in hardware grunt. Despite being hailed as the world’s first DirectX 9.0 compliant barebone, it dribbled out a meagre 636 marks in 3DMark05. But it did do remarkably well in Half-Life 2, however. In our high quality test at 1024 x 768, it managed to squeeze out 29.5 fps – so it will play games, but hardcore gamers may want an after-market card.
 
In the tradition of previous machines, it only includes a 240W power supply, so for stability’s sake a powerful graphics card isn’t recommended. In the features department, it has optical audio ins and outs and utilises ATI’s Surroundview for two or more monitors with an added graphics card. Overall, the ST20G5 is a decent implementation of ATI’s foray into motherboard chipset manufacture, and delivers enough features to cater for a very wide audience.