Shuttle SD36G5M

If Intel is to be believed, the next best thing for the PC is Viiv. It aims to make PCs much easier to use, particularly when it comes to accessing and sharing all that digital media you have at home. A rigid set of components is specified for Viiv compatibility, guaranteeing compliant products to all work together (see p134). Given this, we were intrigued by Shuttle's claims of a Viiv-ready barebones.

The best way to see the SD36G5M is as a potential Viiv system; the motherboard supports all the Viiv bits it can, and you have to fill in the blanks. You'll first need a Pentium D to sit in the LGA775 socket and, when buying this, you should consider getting a copy of Windows Media Center Edition too, as it can only be purchased with hardware and is yet another requirement of Viiv.

You'll also probably need to invest in a new hard disk unless you already have a SATA drive with NCQ (Native Command Queuing) capabilities. This plugs into one of the headers, and there's room on the drive caddy for two disks, which is handy if you plan to use a TV tuner with Media Center. The main software elements of Viiv (consisting largely of special drivers) are supplied on a CD, and once these are installed, you can move onto what's currently the stand-out feature: Quick Resume, enabling near-instant startup and shutdown. We experienced a few teething troubles, but enabling a dedicated option in the BIOS soon had it working smoothly. Once Update Roll-up 2 for Media Center was installed, we had a fully functioning Viiv PC.

Actually, building the system is ludicrously easy. With the drive caddy removed there's plenty of space, and Shuttle has routed all the various cables to exactly where they need to be. Shuttle is also conscious of the heat that a Pentium D creates, so the CPU heatsink transfers this heat to a rear radiator quickly using heatpipes, and then blows this heat straight out the back. However, even with SmartFan keeping this fan as quiet as possible, the SD36G5M makes more noise than is comfortable in a living-room environment.

For comparative purposes we swapped in our standard test kit, which includes the non-NCQ Western Digital Raptor. Quick Resume still worked fine but, even with this tiny change, Intel offers no guarantee of compatibility with forthcoming Viiv peripherals, software or services. The overall application score of 0.91 in our real-world benchmarks is plenty for just about any task, but still 9 per cent slower than a desktop equivalent using the same components and chipset.

Intel's own Viiv-compatibility testing tool (available for download from www.intel.com) refused to certify the 945G chipset of this Shuttle as being suitable either, giving an indication of just how new all this technology is. Building a Media Center PC can be a tricky business at the best of times, and building one based around Viiv is a mixed blessing. If you want an easy life, we'd advise leaving it to the system integrators for the time being, but for the Viiv curious, it's another starting point to consider.

Author: Cive Webster