have never been good value, with the rise of the small footprint eeealikes they are increasingly bad value.

Efros

Paris cos she knows a Shuttle is only useful on a loom.

I built a Shuttle SX48P2 for my daughter about a month ago and once you add case, PSU (its rare to find decent cases with a PSU now) and motherboard you are pretty much in the same ballpark cost-wise.

I put an old E6600 core2duo cpu in, a Radeon 4830 (perfect for 19" and below), 500GB h/d and 4GB geil memory. All in it was £500 and is pretty much silent.

I think the mechanical engineering on the P2 series is simply superb - airflow is maximised, fan noise minimised. Fitting a Radeon 4870 to my wife's Shuttle box did sort of destroy the quiet ;) Works perfectly though which is nice for me as I borrow it for Eve - the only game I've ever had which has destroyed two graphics cards ;)

The Shuttle box in the review does indeed look like it IS going to have cooling issues. I haven't seen any of their boxes which look like that for several years. I wouldn't even want to consider putting a 4850 in that as it WILL be a problem come summer.

Just because Vista doesn't work better (at the moment) doesn't mean Ubuntu, for example, wouldn't.

Since data to/from RAM has to pass through the FSB on this system, and RAM run at DDR2-667 in dual-channel mode already fully saturates the 1333MHz FSB bandwidth, there's not much point in running the RAM at DDR2-800 or DDR2-1066.

My biggest beef with these Shuttle et al barebones systems is their size and shape: they're not wide enough to perch a monitor on, too fat to sit behind one, and too squat to sit happily on the floor.

Bog standard slimline desktop PCs do it for me every time.