Labs

While most of the systems in this group are black, Shuttle's SD32G2 is silver. It looks smart, but to avoid spoiling its looks you'll need to find an optical drive with a silver bezel.

The instructions are on a fold-out sheet, and are clear and easy to follow. Once you've lifted out the drive cage, there's plenty of room to get at the processor cooler, which is simple to screw

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into place. There's no door covering the optical drive, which makes the drive easier to fit.

You can fit up to two hard disks alongside the optical drive, one of which can be an IDE hard disk. If you fit two SATA disks, you can set them as a RAID 0 or 1 array. Like AOpen's EU965 it has a Gigabit Ethernet port and 7.1 surround sound, but the SD32G2 has no optical or coaxial S/PDIF outputs.

The SD32G2's scores in our 2D test were impressive; its overall score of 153 was one of the best. When fitted with our GeForce 7800GTX 3D graphics card, it produced 28.8fps in Call of Duty 2 and 64.5fps in Doom 3. These speeds are almost identical to those of the AOpen EU965.

Shuttle's SD32G2 is fast in 2D and 3D applications. It doesn't look quite as good as AOpen's EU965, but it didn't have any problems in our 2D benchmarks. It's also much cheaper and easier to put together. If you're building a mini PC and you want to play 3D games, this is our Best Buy.