Shuttle XPC G5 3300M

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/desktops/0,39029981,49293137,00.htm

Reviewed 2 October 2007

Reviewed by Leo Waldock

The Shuttle XPC G5 3300M came to us from Ambros, Shuttle's UK distributor, as a fully-built PC, instead of the usual barebones. Basically, it's a Shuttle SG33G5M with a Core 2 Duo E6750 processor, 2GB of DDR2 RAM, a TV tuner and a GeForce 8600 GTS graphics card running on Windows Vista Home Premium.

For a £940 price tag, what could we expect from this media centre PC?

Design
The Shuttle SFF chassis is small at 200 by 185 by 310mm, so you should have no problem finding it a home next to your game consoles and home theatre hardware. 

There's a whopping seven USB ports on the 3300M, with four at the back

The mirrored front of the Shuttle conceals a series of flaps and covers. At the top is a stealth door that hides the multi-format DVD writer. Below it is a covered four-slot card reader and a single USB 2.0 port. In the middle, there's a VFD display that gives information from the music you're listening to or the movie that you're watching. Finally, at the bottom of the 3300M, there are headphone and microphone jacks, two additional USB ports and a mini FireWire port.

On the back of the Shuttle there's a comprehensive array of connectors. Included are five audio mini jacks and an optical audio output. You'll also find four more USB 2.0 ports -- if you're keeping track, that's a grand total of seven. There's also one eSATA port and a Gigabit LAN controller. The graphics connectors consist of VGA and HDMI outputs for the integrated graphics, and there's an HDMI-to-DVI adapter in the box.

There's a surprise in store as Shuttle has installed an XFX 8600 GTS graphics card with dual DVI ports and an S-Video output. The second add-in card is a TV tuner with RF and S-Video inputs.

Shuttle uses a small internal power supply with a rating of 105W. It has a kettle connector on the back of the PC so you don't have to worry about a messy external power brick. The dominant feature on the back of the chassis is a perforated exhaust area for the 90mm fan that Shuttle uses for its ICE cooling system.

The cover of the chassis is formed from a single piece of aluminium sheet that is matt black in colour with perforations on each side to assist cooling.

Features
If you undo three thumbscrews on the back of the cover, you can lift it away to reveal the innards of the PC. Undo two more screws and you can lift out the tray that holds the optical drive, card reader and hard drive, although you'll have to unplug a few cables. You'll see the ICE cooler that covers the Core 2 Duo processor. The single module of DDR2 memory is clearly visible at the front of the Shuttle motherboard, too. There's another memory slot available for expansion but 2GB is plenty for Windows Vista Home Premium.

The motherboard is a Shuttle model based on Intel's G33 chipset. On paper, this is a decent basis for a media centre as the internal chipset isn't cooled by noisy fans, and its onboard GMA 3100 graphics will support HDMI/HDCP, which is required for playing Blu-ray or HD DVD movies.

Unfortunately drivers for enabling HDMI/HDCP weren't available at the time of assembly, so Shuttle has chosen to install a separate (fully HDMI/HDCP-ready) graphics card, designed for gamers. This is a fairly pointless addition since although the card allows HDMI/HDCP, the PC doesn't have a Blu-ray or HD DVD drive. More damagingly, the card makes noise -- the last thing you want in a media centre PC.

Although the XFX GeForce 8600 GTS graphic card adds the ability to play games that the Intel graphics can't touch it also bumps up the noise levels significantly and must add about £100 to the cost. We were told that the XFX graphics should include a DVI-to-HDMI adapter so you can connect the Shuttle to your HDTV. However, there was no adapter in the package.

The other media centre features are also suspect as we didn't get a Windows MCE remote control -- not to mention a mouse or a keyboard -- and the PCI TV card didn't work properly. It's a Compro VideoMate DVB-T220 with Philips SAA7130HL chip and while Windows Vista appeared to scan the airwaves successfully, we couldn't find any TV channels to watch. Switching to a USB Terratec tuner connected to the same roof mounted aerial gave a full selection of channels so the VideoMate would definitely seem to be the guilty party.

Performance
Performance was good. The 2.67GHz Core 2 Duo is the fastest dual core CPU that Intel makes. The Shuttle has plenty of memory, as well as a decent 500GB hard drive, even though the XFX 8600 GTS is a middling gaming graphics card.

If you didn't know the 3300M used a small form factor then the benchmark figures would suggest that it was a regular gaming PC. It scored an overall 6,940 on our PCMark05 test and 5,444 on our 3DMark06 test. With the Intel graphics, the overall PCMark05 score drops to 4,877.

Conclusion
If the Shuttle used the integrated Intel graphics to provide near silent support for high definition movies then we'd very likely be impressed. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Instead, you pay a hefty premium for a small, attractive PC that is too noisy to earn a place in your living room. The fact that we had problems with the TV tuner merely adds an extra straw or two to the overloaded camel's back. Try Shuttle's XPC mini X 200MA instead for your multimedia home setup.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday