Thoughts
Shuttle's SB62G2 does most things pretty well. It gratefully accepts and cools a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 without issue or murmur. It has a number of useful features, spanning on-board video, front-mounted connectivity, tiny footprint, dual LAN and quiet operation. There's a lot of good here, absolutely no doubt about that. What we don't like, however, is the quality of the on-board video's 2D, and one can almost forget it if playing some recent titles is what you hanker for. Similarly, Shuttle has provided on-board graphics but has not maximised its appeal by not providing some form of video out. We can see this cube sitting in offices, bedrooms and lounges. It has all the requisite features and can match most modern hi-fis in the looks department. That's why no inherent TV-Out is a little mystifying and disappointing.It's an extremely rapid package, but it's not the fastest available right now. That honour, we believe, now resides with the SN85G4, which in common parlance is the Socket-754 Athlon 3200-powered XPC. There's not much else one can say without repeating obvious observations. It's a Shuttle XPC, which is a selling point in itself. It's fast, stable and reasonably featured.
Perhaps we're being critical here but the XPC line doesn't seem to have evolved greatly over the past 18 months. We want it all, all without compromise. That entails Wi-Fi support, FireWire connectivity and perhaps even a snazzy remote control. If you've got a Socket-478 CPU and are short of space but thick of wallet the SB62G2 may help relieve you of some hard-earned cash. Lots of a good and a little bad make the Shuttle SB62G2 a mildly attractive proposition.
