Stability

If you leave it to its own devices in the BIOS it works wonderfully – it never put a foot wrong. With an AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ in its belly, pushing the limits of the 90nm SOI process, it does get very loud under extended load because the heat builds up. It's understandable since there's only the single 92mm fan expelling a significant amount of air from the case.

We swapped out the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ for an Athlon X2 BE-2350 and loaded the CPU and IGP; it didn't bat an eyelid. The entire system was barely even noticeable as well (and this is with every other PC off in the office because it's New Year’s Day). The passively cooled IGP doesn't make a looping 3DMark06 look all that playable at 640x480, but it still kept on going regardless of the tiny cooler.

Overclocking

With the right CPU the SN68PTG5 still likes to overclock – with our favourite Athlon X2 BE-2350 we easily hiked it up to 250MHz CPU bus at 2.6GHz and a 1.25GHz HyperTransport frequency. It'll happily sit all day at this speed, so why pay more for an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+?

Our final overclock was a very healthy 265MHz CPU bus giving a CPU frequency of 2.78GHz and 1.265GHz HyperTransport. We did manage to get the system to boot all the way up to 280MHz CPU bus but it failed to reach Windows – beyond this it became a little temperamental coming back down the frequency scales, but everything was resolved with simple a CMOS reset.

Power Consumption

With the Athlon X2 BE-2350 and IGP loaded with 3DMark06 and Prime95 during our stability test above, the 83W load nuzzled its way up to 87W – as nice and energy efficient that 5W GeForce 7050PV GPU is, it'll hardily churn out the FPS.

We tried to load the system with an Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT and 6000+ but the power draw was just too much for it and it wouldn't post. We replaced the GeForce 8800 GT with and AMD Radeon HD 3850 and everything worked as expected – that is, until we loaded the system. Even before we got around to testing the Radeon HD 3850 the 40mm PSU fans whirred louder and louder until the system automatically cut out within a few minutes of just loading the CPU. It’s completely understandable considering the 6000+ alone guzzles all the available power from the puny 250W PSU.

The MSI K9A2 CF board's very low power AMD 790X chipset and limited features help compensate for the more powerful Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT, whereas even with AMD's superior power regulation on its Radeon HD 3850 the combination of this and SN68PTG5 still loads the little PSU up to a massive 90 percent.

Obviously there's no provided 6-pin PCI-Express connector for a reason, and even if you use an adapter you have to be extremely careful what you use in the PCI-Express x16 slot. If you absolutely must invest in a discrete graphics card – be aware that you’ll have to balance CPU and GPU power consumption.

Conclusions and Value

The SN68PTG5 can be had for a very reasonable £173 – it's certainly worth it over the £155 SN68SG2 which features the older looking chassis and inferior Nvidia GeForce 7025 IGP instead. At the other end of the scale, the SN68PTG6 Deluxe is £60 more expensive at £227 but all you get extra is a few more features and an updated chassis that we can't say looks any better than the G5. You still get the same motherboard and chipset as the G5, and to be honest we can't see why you'd pay such a premium.

As a Home Theatre box, it works fantastically and it has everything you need: great looks, inexpensive, HDMI, tonnes of connectivity, Dolby and DTS sound options as well as S/PDIF and its SFF but still takes full height expansion ports. It doesn't matter if you can't set performance memory settings because you don't need them, but the major and critical issue is that you chose an appropriate CPU. We saw back when we reviewed the Biostar TF-7050M2 board what this chipset is capable of, and while using a 65nm CPU like an Energy Efficient 5000+ or a BE-2350 obviously have a lower thermal output.

When we dropped in that BE-2350 the noise dropped dramatically, to the point where it could sit fully loaded on the desk next to you all day and it would literally just hum gently. If anything, you have to put more consideration into the DVD drive used – ideally, you want to get one that can have its speed manually turned down through software.

The two 40mm fans are audible, but they react to heat from load – so keep the load down by using cool components and you'll save money as well as noise. If you do want to force feed the system something powerful in the PCI-Express x16 slot expect the overall system volume to rise quite significantly.

What alternatives are there? Well, you could get an Abit AN-M2HD motherboard which is a larger micro ATX board, but you also get two more DDR2 slots, and an extra PCI and PCI-Express x1 slot. Case wise, there's something like the Thermaltake Mozart or Antec Fusion v2 Media Centre Case which also comes with a 430W PSU. Both of these are in excess of £100 though making it no cheaper than purchasing the Shuttle XPC SN68PTG5 instead which is also much smaller in size.

If you're looking at mini-ITX which is smaller again, then the cost of a board with HDMI alone is usually the same price of the entire SN68PTG5 XPC.

If I were personally kitting out one of these I'd still go for the BE-2350 even though it was more expensive than I remember it being. The Energy Efficient 5000+ is only £25 more but it's 500MHz faster. If I needed the extra oomph I'd simply overclock it a bit. 2GB of DDR2 is dirt cheap now and a cheap but quality Samsung 500GB hard drive has oodles of space. Finally drop in a SATA DVD drive and rip out that nasty IDE cable – if extra hard drive space is needed, there's always eSATA, which keeps things cooler inside as well. For just £350 you have a complete Home Theatre PC that'll see you well into the realm of High-Definition. Job Done!

Final Thoughts

It absolutely does not matter about the system’s shortcomings because it does what it's designed to do, excellently, on the condition that you use the right hardware inside. Plan it out like I did above and you can get yourself a very inexpensive, yet very capable media centre that sits in a tiny footprint. Even if you don't want an HTPC, it can be used as a general productivity box for the family—video, audio, web, documents etc—and you'd be hard pressed finding something so inexpensive but upgradable.

The Shuttle SN68PTG5 sits at an almost perfect price to feature ratio and as a result, I would absolutely recommend it to anyone looking to build a Home Theatre PC.

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