Jumping on the high-definition bandwagon that's now being hitched to home-theatre-oriented PCs, Shuttle has released an XPC that it claims is: "a must-have for owners of high-resolution flat-screen televisions."

The falling prices for such televisions - where a 40in full-HD model (1,920x1,080) can be purchased for £699 from a big-name manufacturer - makes it a juicy market to go after, we reckon.

Shuttle's pre-configured mini-PC Media-Centre is based around the XPC SN68SG2 cube with PF27 VFD display, with support for AMD's AM2 processors (but not AM2+, it seems); 320GB hard drive, an ATI Radeon HD 3450 256MiB graphics card; Blu-ray/HD DVD combo drive; 2GiB DDR2-667 RAM; DVB-T tuner, and Windows Vista Home Premium.

Based on the 65W TDP AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+, the base package costs some £900. We'd much prefer it to ship with the new 45W TDP models, though.

We'd much rather it be basd on an energy-efficient Athlon and the 780G chipset, frankly.

Shuttle will have some healthy competition with ASUS' recently-announced Essentio CS5110, which is both smaller and sleeker.

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