Shuttle XPC P 8100H - P4 630 3 GHz

Advantages: Small, great heatsink!, Firewire built it!
Disadvantages: The size limits the lack of drive space

...I have very little space for a PC in my study area (i.e. hole under the stairs!) and I hate clutter anyway so I wanted a PC I could stick in a cupbaord but still leave space for all my other compurter perifferals. This fitted the bill. It is the easy self build PC really as the it comes as a case with the mother board fitted (the hard part of a self build really I guess). I needed a CD/ DVD drive, a hard drive, processor and some RAM. This takes upto 2G of RAM and a P4 intel processor (there are different versions for other processors). I put a 3G P4 in mine and was glad to see it does support the hyper threading technology, which allows for faster multitasking. Wether it does 2 tasks at once or does some fancy concurrent tasking management I'm not sure, but it processes things very fast from my point of view! When putting it together... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Easy of access and small size
Disadvantages: None

...I got this in December 2006 and am extremely happy with it. All computers seem pretty much the same to me but the xpc is very compact meaning that I don't even have to put it in the "tower" part of my PC desk but can put it in the top section which I think was meant for DVDs! It looks really funky as the front lights up. It starts up quickly and has all the functionality I could need - including 8 USB ports of which two are on the front making it easy to upload my i-pod/phone details etc and card slots for pretty much every memory card includeing SD and the Sony specific Memory Stick (which I used to have to use a converter for) which makes it ultra easy to use - these are also on the front thus giving ease of access - you just slot the card in and away you go.... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful

Advantages: Compact, powerful, fairly quiet, stylish
Disadvantages: Quality Control needs improving

...without needing large pockets of air by dividing heat dissipation into 3 areas: a right-to-left air draft to cool the CPU, 2 small rear fans to push out hot air generated by the hard disk and DVD drive, and a larger rear fan to draw out heat from the video card and motherboard chipset. Ok, so there are still 5 fans in this mini PC but 3 of them are large ones that rotate more slowly, minimising overall noise. ::: Small Form Factor vs Expandability ::: With the actual case being so small, there is very little scope for expanding (or 'upgrading', if you prefer the term) the components inside. For example, how would you fit in one of those enormous AGP graphics cards? The answer: you don't -- the motherboard is designed to take the new PCI Express-sized graphics cards, and the P8100G comes pre-fitted with the useful ATI X600Pro (which has 256MB... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful