Nick Race20 February 2008, 12:38 PM
This little beauty from Shuttle fits in its “Glamour” range of SFF PCs, but we don’t see it.
Sure, it looks good, but we’re not certain what makes this tiny PC more glamorous than any other Shuttle. Thankfully, it makes a good HTPC.
The SN68PTG6 is built around the Nvidia 630A chipset, supporting AMD Athlon X2 and Sempron processors using a 1GHz Hypertransport link. The CPU is sandwiched beneath one of Shuttle’s I.C.E cooling systems, which moves heat away from the chip to a radiator at the back of the case. It supports two slots of DDR2-800 up to 2GB per channel for a maximum total of 4GB.
Graphics for this model is provided by the Nvidia 7050PV graphics chipset, which is built from the ground up for video playback. The chipset supports native HDMI and Nvidia’s PureVideo technology, and well suits an HTPC. There’s a 16x PCI Express slot for single-width graphics cards, but be careful as you’ll need to do some rerouting of the cables to get power to a card that requires it. Also keep in mind that the system’s PSU is only 300W, so low power is the way to go.
The SN68PTG6 is also packed with interesting extras: there’s a flip-down fingerprint reader and front-mounted USB and FireWire, including a “Speed Link” connection for hooking up two PCs for transferring files. The Shuttle is also packed with Wi-Fi 802.11g and Bluetooth, so it’s well equipped out of the box. The Wi-Fi adaptor is connected internally by USB, so if you don’t need it consider putting a slim USB key in there for ReadyBoost under Vista.