Small form-factor PCs are nothing to laugh at. If you shop around, you can find yourself with a very powerful machine that will definitely make you purr.

We’ve been fans of small-form-factor PCs for quite some time. Shuttle pioneered the concept a few years back, and has gradually evolved the platform, splitting its product line into two main groups—the P series and G series. The P series chassis are slightly larger and completely tool-free, but can support the most powerful CPUs—albeit with a bit of additional noise. We reviewed the Shuttle SN25P from this series last February. The G series has evolved from the classic small Shuttle cube, and has been targeted towards more midrange applications. An example is the ST20G5 Socket 939 XPC, which we reviewed in June. While you can often put powerful CPUs and graphics cards in G series systems, the power supplies are sometimes not up to the task.

Along comes the SD11G5. Shuttle takes a page from its own ST62K Zen PC, and moves the power supply to an external power brick. Unlike the ST62K, however, the SD11G5 supports discrete graphics by incorporating a PCI Express x16 slot. You could use the Intel GMA900 integrated graphics core for an even quieter solution. But as we’ll see shortly, pairing up the SD11G5 with a good graphics card can yield a pretty potent gaming system. [Read the rest]

Tags: shuttle, sd11g5, st62k zen pc, small-form-factor, pentium m