Labs

Shuttle's SG33G5M is the best-looking barebones kit here. It's designed for use with Windows Media Center, and comes with built-in support for Dolby Digital Live and DTS Connect, an HDMI port for connecting to an HD TV and a remote control with the receiver integrated into the case. The front-mounted display shows information such as the currently playing music track and looks particularly sleek thanks to its silver coloured screen and blue LED lettering.

Assembling the SG33G5M is straightforward. It has an easily removable cover and a combined fan-heatsink.

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Thankfully, the SG33G5M was much quieter than Shuttle's SG31G2 when running our benchmark tests and proved to be one of the quietest barebones kits here.

Unfortunately, the SG33G5M's integrated graphics chip isn't powerful enough to play back HD video smoothly. You can remedy this by installing your own graphics card in the PCI-E x16 slot, but you first have to change two blocks of jumpers to disable the onboard graphics. Once we did this, our frame rate of 38.1fps in Call of Duty 2 was impressive.

The SG33G5M is the only barebones kit to have overclocking controls in its BIOS, so you can squeeze a bit more performance out of your components. You shouldn't need to for normal use, though, as this system delivered some of the best benchmark results here.

We were generally impressed with the SG33G5M. It's a quiet barebones system that's well specified for use as a media centre PC. However, it's more expensive than the other media centre barebones kits here, the AM2-based Shuttle SN68PTG6 Deluxe and MSI's Media Live. Unless you must have an Intel-based media center PC, Shuttle's SN68PTG6 is the better buy.