Thoughts
This is arguably Shuttle's fastest XPC yet. The combination of a fast chipset and fantastic CPU make it a very attractive proposition to enthusiasts, gamers and power users everywhere. We kind of expected it to be quick. Our initial Athlon 64 Clawhammer coverage indicated that performance was never going to be an issue.
Previous XPCs have been generally easy to work with. Shuttle, for some bizarre reason, has omitted the standard, removable drive cage in favour of a single slide-out hard drive holder. That leaves one with little room to work with, especially on the storage ports' side. Why change a winning formula ?. The power cables also need to be a little big longer to accommodate molex-driven AGP cards without having to add in a lengthy extender and splitter. The 6-in-1 card reader is a nice touch that's sure to go down well. It does come at the expense of a floppy drive mounting ... the 'sacrifice' seems to be worth it. Setting up the SN85G4 takes a little extra thought than has previously been the case, though.
The nForce3 150 Athlon 64-based chipset is fast, stable yet bereft of a number of features found on the nForce2 MCP-T. Shuttle has done a decent job of balancing board estate and the need for discrete controllers to power expected features. The single PCI slot, therefore, will probably be used to house a dedicated, hardware-accelerated sound card. AC'97 audio is passable but not great.
What we'd have liked to have seen was some form of wireless networking integrated into the motherboard. The SN85G4 is small and light enough to be picked up by a small child. Portability is one of its chief selling points. So why not extend its usefulness by adding in Wi-Fi as standard ?. It would be great to simply take it downstairs, plug it into a nice TFT and browse the net in style.
We're trying to pick small faults with what is an excellent addition to the XPC range. Its attractiveness stems from the use of AMD's new Athlon 64 Clawhammer CPU. It has a number of small idiosyncrasies that we'd like to see ironed out, but this is about as fast as consumer-level PCs currently go. Housed in a small, stylish case, the Shuttle XPC SN85G4 has awesome performance potential. Laptop manufacturers often talk in terms of 'desktop or tower replacement'. This XPC could replace almost any home PC. It would have been difficult for Shuttle to go wrong with this design. Thankfully it's a robust and sexy beast of a machine that's sure to sell well. Pricing hasn't been confirmed at present. Expect to see it retail at around the £250 - £270 mark.
