Product Reviews

The PC has traditionally been seen as a bulky beige box, designed for practicality and expandability rather than style and convenience. For many people who already own a PC, or those looking to install a second machine, perhaps into a living room, typical desktop PC cases are simply too imposing. Not so for Shuttle's SpaceWalker SS50, which provides a highly integrated Pentium 4 system in a case little bigger than your average toaster.

The SS50's tiny dimensions are impressive enough, but Shuttle seems to have concentrated its efforts on styling too - and with great success. Aluminium cases generally look better than beige ones, but combined with the size and piercing, almost neon-like front LEDs, the SS50 is one of the best-looking PC cases we've seen.

Not only this, but there's an amazing amount of functionality thrown in. The FlexATX Pentium 4 motherboard uses the latest 478-pin socket and supports the standard Pentium 4 with 400MHz front side bus. The motherboard also accepts PC2100 DDR memory and UltraDMA/100 hard disks, giving excellent performance potential.

To test the SS50, we built a system using a 1.7GHz Pentium 4, 256Mb of PC2100 SDRAM, a 40Gb UltraDMA/100 hard disk and Windows XP. There's also

ADVERTISEMENT

space for a floppy disk drive and a 5.25in drive, which could house a DVD writer, taking care of the most typical media reading and writing needs. Assembly was simple too, thanks to good documentation, and we completed the build quickly, with everything fitting together snugly and neatly.

Expandability suffers from size restrictions (particularly storage expansion), but Shuttle has still packed in two PCI slots, six-channel audio, an S-Video TV-out, front and rear USB and IEEE-1394 ports, 10/100BaseTX Ethernet and legacy I/O. This makes the SS50 suitable for a variety of roles, from a simple office PC to a server or even PC VCR with the addition of a TV card.

In fact, the only real criticism that can be levelled at the motherboard is the lack of an AGP slot, with graphics handled by the SiS650 chipset. That said, you can still allocate up to 64Mb of main memory as a frame buffer, and there's hardware support for DVD decoding too. While the SiS650 can't compete with modern graphics cards in terms of 3D performance, we still managed to get a playable 32fps (frames per second) in Quake III at 1,024 x 768 in 32-bit colour, using 32Mb of shared memory.

Application-based performance was also good, scoring 0.81 in our 2D benchmarks. This is perfectly fast enough for office use, and with more memory and a faster processor you could easily build a powerhouse PC.

However, the SS50 is noisy, particularly the heatsink fan, which may be intrusive in a living room location. Its cooling was fine, though, and we experienced no problems leaving the system running for several days.

The Shuttle SpaceWalker SS50 is a superb piece of design, and despite the limitation of not having an AGP slot it's well-featured and highly attractive. If you're sick of bulky beige boxes, this is the perfect solution.