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Rick Rizner, John Goddard
Shuttle is well known for designing cases and motherboards that shoehorn a full PC's worth of components into a space about the size of a couple of shoeboxes. We tried out the company's newest gaming PC--built around AMD's 2.6-GHz Athlon 64 FX-55 and 1GB of RAM--and were pleased but not astounded by its performance.
Unlike many small systems, the XPC P2500g has a dedicated graphics board. It uses the PCI Express graphics bus and an ATI Radeon X850 XT board with 256MB of graphics RAM. With all that horsepower, the P2500g racked up a WorldBench 5 score of 105--a little below average among systems we've tested with comparable specs, and 16 percent slower than the top score of 125 earned by Xi Computer's MTower 64 AGE-SLI. That 16 percent speed gap probably wouldn't cramp the style of someone who plays nothing more demanding than computer solitaire, but aficionados of first-person shooters might find it makes the difference between fragging and being fragged. The frame rates we saw in our gaming tests were good, but not the best--in most cases trailing the top scorers by about 10 frames per second and finishing in eighth place in several tests. However, the P2500g put up 435 frames per second in Unreal Tournament at 1024 by 768 pixels and 16-bit color--the fourth-best result of any system we've tested recently.
The speaker system that came with our test machine, Logitech's monster-size Z-5500 Digital 5.1 set, takes up more room than the PC itself. The system is nicely designed, with streamlined, reasonably classy-looking satellites and a controller console that lets you keep the volume and mute buttons (plus a headphone jack) in easy reach. When I played a movie, I heard nice fidelity, as well as depth and separation, from the speakers. Various music tracks-- including pop, jazz, and opera--sounded nice but not dazzling. I didn't turn the sound way up or go for booming bass, for fear of blowing out my eardrums as well as my coworkers'. If you choose not to order these, you can knock $299 off the P2500g's price....