Digital Media Thoughts reviews the Shuttle SD11G5 XPC (US$340), a Small Form Factor (SFF) barebones that features Intel Pentium M 533/400 MHz FSB / Intel Pentium M LV 400MHz FSB / Celeron M processor support, Intel 915GM + ICH6M chipset, 2x 400/533 DDR2 DIMM slots, integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 graphics, 150MB/s SATA support, Creative Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit 7.1 channel EAX Advanced HD audio, Gb LAN, Firewire (4-pin), and ICE Technology CPU heat-pipe.
The SD11G5, like all Shuttle XPC units, represent excellent value for the money, but you do pay a premium for the miniaturization technology in these little boxes. The SD11G5 is not the computer for someone on a budget - Pentium M CPUs are not cheap, so if cheap is what you want, look elsewhere. That said, if you have another PC that you'd like to transplant into the SD11G5, all you need to buy is the CPU. I expect to get great use out of the SD11G5 and have no qualms recommending it to others, with one exception: depending on the type of optical drive they have, they may have trouble with it. I'd dearly like to see Shuttle come up with a better optical drive bay door solution, because having to buy a new optical drive and hoping that it works is a poor solution. Shuttle has clever engineers working for them, so I'm sure they can come up with a clever solution if they try. Beyond that, and the obvious limitations of having the SD11G5 only ship in white and with on DVI port, the SD11G5 is a superb computer. [Digital Media Thoughts]
The article describes the components of the SD11G5, shows how to build it into a working machine, and benchmarked its performance. If you are thinking about building a small form factor PC using the SD11G5, this might be a good reference article.
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