Final thoughts
Final thoughts
Shuttle's decision to market its own XPC SFF units in pre-built fashion was an obvious move that we thought would have occurred sooner. Showcasing the power of its SN25P, Shuttle generously equipped our review sample with an AMD Athlon 64 FX-60, 2GBytes of DDR400 RAM, and a Connect3D Radeon X1900 XTX 512MB graphics card.Build quality is largely dictated by the chassis and the SN25P is, perhaps, the best of the current lot. Its 350W Silent X PSU never missed a beat during some torturous testing and intelligent fan controlling, accessed via a tweakable BIOS, kept noise down to a minimum.
Performance-wise, we also little to complain about. Shuttle could have used enthusiast-quality memory to extract the most out of the CPU's potential and a larger hard drive would be preferable, especially given the fact that Shuttle doesn't offer additional drives as upgrades even though the chassis can accommodate them. The supplied Radeon X1900 XTX 512MB graphics card ran through our high-resolution gaming benchmarks with flying colours and the AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 made short work of our dual-core tests.
It should be clear to you that we like the power, portability and chicness present in this pre-built SN25P. The biggest stumbling block, as far as we can see, is the asking price of £2,199. It's around £500 more than it would cost to source the components yourself and, importantly, costlier than the similar MESH system, albeit dressed up in a regular case, which featured a CrossFired X1900 XT setup and a 400GB hard drive.
Whilst we appreciate the technology that has gone into the Shuttle XPC P 2500G and are fans of this kind of SKU in general, recommendations need to take value for money and future-proofness into account. Therefore we cannot recommend it at its present price point of £2,199; you can buy more power for less money, with an extra year's warranty thrown in. If pricing was to drop down to, say, £1,799 and warranty extended a further year, the P 2500G would take some beating. Further, AMD's recent transition to a new form factor limits the processor upgrade options in the future. As it is, it's a pretty, powerful S939 machine that needs some fat trimming from its RRP.
