Shuttle XPC X200M mini PC

Shuttle revises its small form-factor X100 by... um... removing the AMD GPU

By Leo Waldock • Get more from this author

7th February 2007 12:30 GMT

Page:

There are other changes from the X100HA, with coaxial output for the Realtek HD audio, instead of an optical connection. The Reatek Gigabit Ethernet controller has been replaced by Intel's PRO/100VE equivalent, and the single Firewire connector that you got on the X100HE has been declared Missing In Action. We were very glad to see that the X200M has gained a pair of PS/2 ports as a trusty wired mouse and keyboard can be useful tools if you suffer driver problems that render your USB controllers inoperable.

We ran PCMark05, 3DMark05 and 3DMark06 on the X200M, just as we had on the X100HE. As both machines use the same 1.6GHz Intel Core Duo T2050 processor with PC4300 memory, we had expected that the major difference in performance would be in the graphics department. In fact, the X200M was also significantly slower in terms of processor and memory performance.

Benchmarks: Shuttle XPC X200M vs X100HA
shuttle xpc x200m vs x100ha - benchmark results

The question is, does this matter?

Generally speaking, the answer would be a resounding yes, as a faster PC or laptop is always desirable, but this isn't necessarily the case with a media centre PC, and it brings us to the other new feature in the X200M, the Yuan MPC718 DVB-T Mini PC TV tuner card.