Shuttle SN78SH7

The SN78SH7 is a Socket AM2+ barebones system from Shuttle's 'Glamor' range. Its low key, compact design suggests it has designs on the living room, and indeed the specification indicates it's intended as the basis of a media centre PC.

The giveaway is its integrated Nvidia GeForce 8200 GPU - woefully underpowered for gaming, but fine for viewing HD media.

It includes Nvidia's PureVideo HD decoder, which offloads video decoding from the processor, so while this model will happily take a high-end Phenom, you could equally get away with a low-powered Sempron.

Its HDMI port and 7.1 DTS audio will hook it directly into an existing home cinema setup, and twin eSATA ports make it easy to add external storage.

Internally, it's not a supremely expandable system: you get just one PCI-E 16x slot and an old school PCI connector, and there's only a 300W power supply to drive it all. While some Shuttles provide four DIMM slots, this model has but two, giving a maximum capacity of 4GB of RAM.

As is usual with Shuttles, there's space for one optical drive plus two 3.5in bays, one of which is front-facing so you can fill it with a floppy or a card reader. But unlike some models there are only two SATA channels and two IDE channels. That means you can run two SATA drives in a RAID configuration, but not a SATA optical drive at the same time.

The back plate is, however, well-connected: in addition to the twin eSATA ports there are four USB sockets along with six-pin FireWire and gigabit Ethernet.

A flap at the front folds down to reveal a further two USB ports, four-pin FireWire and front-facing headphone and microphone jacks. Headers on the motherboard allow you to hook up a few other types of connector, including parallel, IR, PS/2 and S/PDIF.

Ultimately, the SN78SH7 is a solid and attractive system - but the price makes it difficult to recommend, despite the 'glamor' nametag.

If all you want is a media box you can get better results for a hundred pounds less by buying a low-end Shuttle and equipping it with a real graphics card such as the ATI Radeon HD 4550.

Yet, if you want something more versatile, the SN78SH7 doesn't open many doors - certainly not as many as you'd hope from a system that could easily cost over £400 once you factor in CPU, memory and drives.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith