Shuttle XPC System G5 8300M Jonesboro GA

Rating: 3/10

The tide of convergent technology is rising fast, and bringing with it curious items like this Media Center PC from Shuttle. If you haven't played with an XP Media Center system they can be quite an impressive combination of TV, HiFi, video and computer technology. Shuttle, famous for small form factor solutions, have made this MCE hardware based on their very stylish and compact XPC model. Having used this equipment for a month, I'm disappointed to say that it reveals more about the failings of MCE that the skills of Shuttle. What confuses me is that many of the issues I encountered were the result of some very poor judgement on Shuttle's behalf. This system is based on the 3GHz LGA775 Prescott, a notoriously hot processor. For a multimedia system why on earth would you do that? As a result the cooling fan is forced to run 100% of the time, drowning out the TV. With a powerful processor and 512MB of dual channel memory this might have made a half decent game system, except they disabled the onboard video (good) and added an X300 PCI Express video card (very bad). They also used a cheap video capture card that made watching TV through the system much lower in quality than through live viewing. To be fair they did get a few things right, like the cute LED display under the glass front which displays all sorts of useful information.

One of these was the words 'Warning", which appeared when the system woke itself up every night to get TV listings, didn't find them because I don't have a network socket in the lounge, and then promptly crashed. This can't actually be blamed on Shuttle, but on the extremely high standards of quality assurance we've comes to expect from Microsoft. If you can get it to work smoothly, and you don't mind watching 'soft' TV imagery then this box has a few neat tricks up its sleeve. The 200GB hard drive allows for 69 hours of best quality video recording, putting any of the Sky Plus boxes in the shade. It can also time shift, and the Internet downloadable channel listings are very detailed. This information even gets tacked onto any recordings you make. The only downside is that you can only record the channel you're watching through the system. You can obviously just use the TV, but that assumes that you're not recording cable or satellite. It's big advantage over the SKY Plus box is that you can dump any recording you make to the inbuilt DVD writer, to keep for posterity. Overall this system represents the reality of Media Center over what could be. If MCE was better and didn't crash, and Shuttle hadn't used this chip, and used better video and capture cards, etc. If in six months Shuttle launches a box using a cooler CPU, and Microsoft actually learn how to make MCE function properly then this could be something worth having. But in the meanwhile it's an expensive alternative to a PVR that doesn't deliver on the expectations.

For more information, visit Micromart.co.uk