Shuttle XPC ST20G5

Verdict: A good-looking small form factor PC, but there's nothing revolutionary about it

The list of 'things that are bad about Star Wars' might be quite long, especially the section headed 'CG Muppetry,' but at the very top should be the amount of licensed tat that the Jedi are responsible for. One look at shop.starwars.com will fill you in: Emperor M&M Plush Buddy, anyone? 'Celebrate the rise of the M&M empire with a great new series of whimsical M&M's plush figures ... Emperor is master of the new dark chocolate empire!'

Indeed. Not all cross-licensing is as bad as this, though, and ATi has indulged in some with its Radeon brand. As well as graphics cards, the company has also been producing motherboard chipsets bearing the Radeon name for some time, and the ATi Radeon Xpress 200 chipset is at the heart of the new Shuttle ST20G5. The Radeon Xpress 200 is available in both Intel and AMD variants, but it's the Socket 939 Athlon 64 version that's inside the ST20G5.

Despite the motherboard being designed to fit inside the XPC chassis, it still has a reasonable range of features. As it's an Athlon 64 board, it has support for DDR RAM, and the customary two DIMM slots. There's a Gigabit Ethernet port, which is provided by a Broadcom chip, as the Radeon Xpress 200 chipset doesn't supply any integrated networking support.

As well as the Broadcom networking chip, there's also a ULi M1573 chip that works as a Southbridge, running the two S-ATA ports and providing them with RAID abilities.

The on-board audio is supplied by a Realtek ALC880 chip, and supports 7.1 surround sound, and it's also - interestingly for an AMD machine - HD Audio-compliant, so it's better than the usual AC97 on-board sound. It's also backed up by two optical S/PDIF ports (an input and output) so if you add a surround-sound decoder and good speakers, such as the Logitech Z-5500s, the ST20G5 will be excellent for watching DVDs.

The Radeon name isn't the chipset's only link to the world of graphics, as the Radeon Xpress 200 also has an integrated graphics processor (IGP). The ST20G5 has both D-SUB and DVI outputs for these on-board graphics, and it borrows 128MB of the main system RAM for its memory. If you're looking to play games on the ST20G5 then it's highly likely that you'll use the single 16x PCI-E slot. However, if you fill this with a Radeon graphics card, you can still make use of the IGP, and run a Deathstar-sized desktop over three monitors. The only problem with the 16x PCI-E slot is that it's too close to the side of the case, so you'll only be able to fit a graphics card with a single-slot cooler. This can mean you're stuck with noisy reference HSFs, which you can't replace with quieter coolers.

It's surprising that this is still a problem, because Shuttle knows the solution, and some of its other models, such as the SN25P, position the 16x PCI-E slot closer to the interior to enable the use of dual-slot graphics cards. The problem is that, modern though it may look, the ST20G5 is based on a dated design. Compared with the newer SN25P, the ST20G5 is showing its age. While the SN25P uses a series of compartments and speed-adjustable fans to cool components, the ST20G5 uses the older Shuttle cooling setup: the PSU runs down one side, with the chassis' main cavity cooled by a single rear exhaust fan. CPU heat is handled by the venerable ICE system, essentially a heatsink attached by heatpipes to a radiator sitting in front of the exhaust fan. The fan itself has been enlarged to a 92mm version, compared with the 80mm version seen in Athlon XP-era Shuttles, so it's quiet - provided you stick to a single hard disk and optical drive, and use the integrated graphics. Adding a second hard drive and high-end graphics card will really push the ST20G5's cooling abilities.

As the ST20G5 uses the classic Shuttle design, it isn't too hard to build. You have to remove the drive cage first to access the CPU socket and DIMM slots. As long as you're using S-ATA hard drives, it's also easy to wire up inside.There's only a single EIDE port, which is intended for the optical drive. The 240W PSU is reasonable for a SFF, though it's well below the 350W PSU used in the SN25P and it lacks a connector for a PCI-E graphics card. As a result, if your PCI-E card needs power then you'll need to use a splitter, and this will take up both of the PSU's free Molexes, so you may find yourself running short of plugs.

PERFORMANCE

In last month's motherboard megatest, the single Radeon Xpress 200-powered motherboard, the MSI RS480M2-IL, lagged behind its nForce4 competitors. Given that the Athlon 64 CPU has an integrated memory controller, this is a little strange. However, we didn't have any similar problems with the ST20G5. At stock speeds, there's nothing intrinsically slow about the Radeon Xpress 200, as the ST20G5 kept pace with all the motherboards included in last month's test. The MSI Radeon Xpress 200 has no overclocking options at all in its BIOS. The ST20G5 is better, though in the same way that Star Wars: Episode III is better than Episode I; it still isn't great. You can only take the FSB up to 232MHz, which is hardly exciting, and during testing, the ST20G5 only remained stable at 215MHz.

The BIOS also allows you to clock the Radeon Xpress 200 IGP at either 300MHz or 350MHz. Being power-crazed lunatics, this decision didn't delay us for too long, and we opted for the higher clock speed. In Far Cry at 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x AA and 2x AF, the Radeon Xpress 200 IGP averaged a woeful 5.7fps. This is faster than any other integrated graphics we've seen - the Intel GMA900 won't even run the Far Cry test - but 6fps isn't even in the same galaxy as 'playable'. Still, 1,280 x 1,024 with AA and AF is reasonably demanding, even for graphics cards costing £100, so it's unfair to expect integrated graphics to cope with these settings. But, even at 800 x 600 with no AA or AF, the Radeon Xpress 200 IGP still couldn't manage a playable frame rate in Far Cry, offering only a creaky 21.6fps.

CONCLUSION

The ST20G5 is a good-looking small form factor PC, but there's nothing revolutionary about it. While the Radeon Xpress 200 performs well at stock speeds, it isn't much of an overclocker. It also lacks features compared with nForce4 - there's no hardware firewall, for instance. Shuttle has done its best to nullify the other deficiencies, by supplying Gigabit Ethernet, decent on-board sound, and RAID by including extra chips.

Compared with Shuttle's P-series models, the ST20G5's chassis shows its age, although it's £50 cheaper than the nForce4 SN25P. The integrated graphics may be poor, but the ability to link them up with a Radeon graphics card might attract some people. If you add a TV card, it could make a decent media centre PC, but for others, the ST20G5 lacks the innovation to stand out on the shelf.