Final thoughts, HEXUS.awards, HEXUS.where2buy
There really is a lot to like about Shuttle's X100HA pre-built SFF unit. It's amongst the most stylish we've seen and would definitely not look out of place in most people's lounges or bedrooms. As is the way of branding, place a Sony badge on it and you'd have the world raving about how good its design department is. Shuttle, then, deserves credit with respect to aesthetics and build quality.We're also fans of using a laptop base for an SFF SKU. Intel's Core Duo CPUs (Yonah, if that rings a bell) are decent performers that deliver an excellent MHz-to-performance ratio. The use of a mobile CPU allows Shuttle to design an almost passive unit, and it can only be heard by placing your ear directly behind the exhaust vent at the rear. WiFi connectivity is cool and an internal USB connector makes it easy to add, say, Bluetooth support.
Shuttle has also thought about upgradeability, as much as a SFF unit allows. It's made a wise choice and made space for a regular 3.5-inch hard drive to be housed at the bottom of the X-type chassis, thereby offering space and speed that laptop drives cannot match. Just add in a Seagate 750GB drive and away you go.
The X100HA also has a myriad of uses. Couple one with a sexy TFT, add peripherals and it makes for the best-looking PC we've come across in a while. It'll work fine for students, a bedroom PC, or media center box with the requisite software.
However, as much as we're fans of the X100HA, we can identify three problems to stop it from gaining universal praise. The first is with the relatively poor performance from the ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 128MiB graphics card. At this price point and taking into account what £1000 laptops now provide, the twice-as-fast MR X1600 should have been included. The X100HA would then have provided competent gaming performance at 1024x768 and 1280x1024, the latter being an LCD-friendly resolution.
The second problem is poor thinking on Shuttle's part with respect to system memory. 512MiB simply isn't enough for a smooth experience with Windows XP. Our benchmarks highlight decent numbers but the reality is that the sample would often chug along with constant accesses to the hard drive. We don't see how a responsible vendor can release an £820 SKU without at least 1GiB of RAM as standard.
Our last concern centres on price. The Shuttle X100HA may be fantastically stylish and superbly built but £820 seems a little too much for a SKU that features the slowest Intel Core Duo CPU, slow-ish hard drive, graphics card and only 512MiB memory.
We'd like to see Shuttle raise the specification of each of these parts because you can buy a laptop (albeit with a smaller hard drive) for the same money from the likes of Dell. Let's not forget that you will need to add a monitor (TFT, presumably) speakers and input devices at the very least, pushing the overall cost over £1,000 barrier.
In summary, should you buy it? Well, it's a fairly unique SKU that would benefit from a change in OS to MCE 2005 and the improvements we've listed in the previous paragraph but, as much as we like it, it does not offer decent value for money at £820. A price drop or increase in specification and we'd happily consider one.
HEXUS Awards
We're awarding the Shuttle X100HA a media innovation award. It's about time that more manufacturers thought outside of the boring beige box and designed SKUs like this.
- Shuttle X100HA SFF
