Product Reviews

While you can quieten most PCs, it's easier to start from scratch using low-power components. Shuttle's XPC SD11G5 is an excellent starting point.

It looks like a standard XPC, but it's got a socket 479 Intel i915-based motherboard, which takes a Pentium M processor. Unlike its big brother, the Pentium 4, the Pentium M is efficient, cool and needs far less power.

Shuttle cools the processor using a heat sink and heat pipe that leads up to a single 80mm fan. Unlike the fan on other Shuttle boxes, though, this one runs very quietly. In fact, when the PC is turned on you'd be hard

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pressed to hear anything. Only when you put your ear extremely close to the vent can you hear the slightest whistle of moving air. It's all helped by the 270W external power supply.

You may worry about the level of performance you can expect from a mobile processor, but there's no need. Shuttle uses Intel's i915 chipset, which supports DDR2 RAM in a dual-channel configuration. We tested using 1GB of matched memory and a Pentium M 755 processor, which costs around £150 including VAT. Its score of 108 in our application benchmarks shows that it's a powerful combination that can run all your office tasks and handle some photo and video editing.

The onboard Intel graphics are as poor as you'd expect and won't run the latest games, but there's a PCI-E x16 slot free, so you can install a much better graphics card. This leaves a free PCI-E x1 slot and a mini PCI slot, so you can add a notebook-style wireless adaptor for around £40.

With the usual range of front- and rear-mounted ports and Shuttle's excellent instructions, the SD11G5 is an attractive barebones case that's ideal for anyone wishing to build a silent computer. However, it is a little expensive.