Shuttle XPC P 2500G: Gaming's mighty dwarf

By Rory Reid on 11 April 2006, 11:18am

Crave is as big a fan of gaming PCs as the next blog. But one thing that really gets on our nerves is the common belief that gaming PCs have to be enormous 6m-tall 20kg monsters like the Alienware Aurora 7500.

It's an often-overlooked fact that you can cram almost as much gaming gear into a small form factor (SFF) PC as you can a full tower desktop. Shuttle, purveyor of some of the most stylish SFF machines, has just reminded us of the polygon-pushing possibilities of such PCs by sending us its latest, the XPC P 2500G.

Based on the SN25P chassis, this diminutive beauty inherits the same cube-like proportions as the majority of Shuttle PCs and has that trademark sexy reflective front panel, but inside it uses the very latest gaming goodies. It has an AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU -- the Big Daddy of gaming processors -- 2GB of DDR400 RAM, and ATI's hottest graphics card, the Radeon X1900 XTX.

Basically, it's very, very fast, and it's not as noisy as you'd expect. Plus there's even an SLI dual graphics card version (based on the SN25P chassis) for even more performance. If you want the ultimate in gaming performance without the potential embarrassment of owning a PC that makes you look like the IT equivalent of a boy racer, the XPC P 2500G can be yours for around £2,350. For more information see our full review. -RR