Shuttle's SV24: Our smallest desktop PC

Final Thoughts

Overall, we were quite impressed with this little box. It's small, cute and well thought out. However, it lacks the expandability of a desktop, which brings up the whole "beige vs. unique" debate. So, why buy this instead of a desktop? If space, heat or looks are an issue, this is a system to consider. We wouldn't recommend this for a primary machine, nor for an average desktop (which has room to store that big, beige PC), but there are lots of other places in which it excels.

As we found out, this makes a great "living room," or "average use" PC. It also makes a great "TV PC." If the applications you use most include Office, Internet Explorer, Netscape, Winamp, ICQ, AIM, etc, you're fine. Of course, you're probably fine with just about any computer out there.

Gamers should look elsewhere. Although the Savage4 core is now quite mature, it wasn't designed to compete against top-of-the-line desktop cards. It will work fine with 2D applications and will probably make a good mobile 3D chipset, but a Doom 3 tamer it is not.

Finally, this model is limited by its support for (only) Pentium III / Celeron CPUs. Support for newer Pentium III Tualatin CPUs is crucial to upgradability and unfortunately not provided by this version of the motherboard. VIA does offer a PL133T chipset with Tualatin support but it is unclear as to if/when we can expect to see that implemented on the board. Shuttle has informed us however that they will be producing a version of the SV24 based on the Pentium 4 processor. With the 0.13-micron Northwood core producing very little heat and running at speeds greater than 2GHz, the SV24's successor might be able to offer some killer performance.

After this endeavor, we like the SV24; it doesn't rethink everything, it shrinks everything...and covers it in attractive aluminum. It doesn't replace that beige PC, it complements it. We expect that Shuttle should have no problem selling them at their list price of $250 USD. Hopefully, that will eventually lead to more interesting machines elsewhere as well.