Shuttle G5 8300M desktop PC

Posted by T3 Online on Wed 31 Oct 2007

What, no ITV2? What were they thinking?

Shuttle was one of the pioneers in helping the PC world move away from boring grey boxes towards smaller, more exciting-looking designs. This media PC is typical of the company's current output. It's housed in a small cube case that's around the same size as the micro hi-fis you see littering the shelves of your local Dixons.

However, the case is crammed with a 3GHz Pentium 4, 512MB RAM and a 200GB hard disk. The PC is preloaded with Windows Media Centre Edition 2005, so it comes with the standard MCE remote control and the infrared transceiver that allows Media Centre to take charge of a digital TV set-top box.

There's no denying the unit's raw performance for media tasks. The ATI X300 graphics card puts in a good showing when recording or playing back TV shows, and even has enough grunt for a spot of gaming.

That said, there are a number of issues that dulled our enthusiasm for this machine. For starters, the unit's quite noisy - something we certainly wouldn't like to have to listen to while watching telly in a front room. It also lacks a digital TV tuner, so you can't watch Freeview channels such as BBC3 and ITV2, unless you hook it up to an external decoder box.

-On the whole, this is a good-looking PC with decent performance, but a Media Centre box that's pretty average. With a digital tuner and reduced fan noise, it would be a much more appealing prospect.