Shuttle XPC P 2500G review

Only one of these ports is in use. The remainder are unoccupied, though two have SATA cables attached to the motherboard. The opposite ends of the cables aren't connected to any devices, but their presence makes it easy to add extra SATA devices without battling with a screwdriver to access the case's cramped interior.

Shuttle has been clever in supplying an NCQ-compatible hard drive. The 250GB Samsung SP2504C has a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 300MB per second, has an 8MB buffer and fast 7,200 RPM rotation speed, and supports the SATA-300 interface rather than the slower, older SATA-150 standard. It's therefore ideal for users who perform disk-intensive tasks such as video editing.

The P 2500G has a good optical drive. Shuttle has opted for the BenQ DW1620, which can write to dual-layer DVD+R discs and records up to 16 hours of VHS quality video at 16x (or about 7 minutes per disc). It's not as versatile as the NEC ND-4551A Labelflash drive, which can print text and images directly to the label surface of compatible discs, but it's fine for most users.

The XPC P 2500G uses the Professional Edition of Windows XP, has a copy of Cyberlink PowerDVD playback software, and a one-year warranty.

Performance
The XPC P 2500G is extremely fast, mainly because of its high-end CPU and graphics card combination. It achieved a PCMark 2005 score of 6,244, and while this isn't as high as that achieved by the Alienware Aurora 7500 PC, it isn't far behind.

Gaming performance was also impressive for a PC using a single graphics card. At the default screen resolution of 1,280x1,024 it achieved a 3DMark 2006 score of 5,565, which is just 3,268 less than the Mesh X-treme FX60 PC, which has the luxury of a dual-graphics card.

At the same resolution with 4x anti-aliasing and 4x anisotropic filtering image quality (IQ) settings enabled, the XPC P 2500G scored 4,472. At a resolution of 1,600x1,200 pixels, it scored 4,894, and at the same resolution with 4x AA and 4x AF it scored 3,837.

It also impressed in real-world gaming tests. It clocked up a Doom 3 frame rate of 109 frames per second (fps) at a resolution of 1,024x768 with 4x AA and 4x AF enabled. This score fell to 87fps at 1,280x1,024, and to 67.5fps at 1,600x1,200, all at the same IQ settings.

With maximum detail settings (6xAA and 16x AF) at a resolution of 1,600x1,200 it achieved 51.6fps, which is still highly impressive.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Kate Macefield