Lose the weight, keep the muscle
Written: Jul 01 '03
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Pros: Small, lightweight, powerful.
Cons: Limited expansion, cramped spaces.
The Bottom Line: If you only needs a few peripherals (CD-RW, AGP video card, 3.5" floppy drive), this baby is for you.
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| jehrenzweig's Full Review: Shuttle SB 51G (SB51G) PC Desktop |
I'm going to save you the suspense: the SB51G is wonderful. It currently serves as my office workstation, on which I do applications and graphics development, and occasionally play Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. It's fast, it's small, it has 95% of everything I need as a gamer / web developer and it's reasonably priced (retails for $300, but you can find it for ~$260 on Froogle.com:
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=sb51g&price1=100&price2=300&price=between&btnP=Go
I had read a lot of good things about the SB51G before I bought it. In fact, such a wide variety of views had so little in the way of bad things to say that it practically sold itself. A few places to read up:
http://www.hexus.net/review.php?review=439
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,661793,00.asp
http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2002q4/shuttle-sb51g/index.x?pg=1
Among the most common complaints I heard were loud noise, lack of expansion potential and price. However, my SB51G really doesn't make much noise besides the normal hum, and occasional CPU chatter when it's busy crunching instructions. The lack of expansion is a trade-off for the amount of space you can reclaim, so that's hardly to be unexpected in purchasing a small-form factor (SFF) case. And the price is reasonable, when you consider the fact that you're getting a 200W power supply, lightweight aluminum case and motherboard.
The only difficult part might be installing all of your hardware. I'm not really a hardware guy, so I had one of my friends help me set it up. Assuming you know what you're doing, you should be up and running in under an hour. The only reason it takes so long is because you're working in tight quarters: you need to install your hardware in steps, because there isn't enough room to slide stuff around helter-skelter.
The SB51G is definitely a worthwhile purchase. If you're looking for the newer and improved models, though, you'd be advised to skip over the SB52G, though, and go straight for Shuttle's newest powerhouse, the SB61G2:
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NDg3
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=SB61G2&price1=0&price2=340&price=between&btnP=Go
Retailing for a whopping $380, it can now be found for $330 street price. The SB61G2 supports Intel P4 CPUs with 800Mhz FSB, AGP8x and Serial ATA RAID-0/RAID-1 (onboard SATA RAID controller). But if you want a tiny box that can handle bleeding-edge hardware and will last for a few years, it might be worth the cash.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 300
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium
Processor speed: over 1000
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW
Hard Drive (GB): Over 50
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Epinions.com ID:
jehrenzweig
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Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 0 members
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