I've always been a fan of Shuttle XPCs in the living room used as HTPCs. They're compact and stylish enough to fit with your home theatre equipment and at the same time, use standard PC sized components which makes them affordable and expandable. Today we look at their SN68PTG6 Deluxe, based on Shuttle's G chassis that will not only fit well in your living room but also as an office PC.

Based on the nVidia GeForce 7050PV chipset, the SN68PTG6 is a nice integrated XPC offering a pretty decent amount of onboard features. Starting off, the onboard GPU is good enough for an office PC as well as one to serve Media content. It has built-in support fornVidia's Pure Video Technology and the HDMI output at the back will have no problem connecting to your LCD or Plasma television. Do keep in mind that the HDMI port is 1.2 and not 1.3 so you might want toseparately connect a digital audio source and the XPC with its Realtek ALC888DD supports 7.1 output with DTS and Dolby Digital Live!

Connectivity is offered with a Gigabit wired connection as well as an 802.11g based Wireless connection. This works out for both offices where you might need high speed networking as well as your home where you might not want any extra wires. I would like to point out that the WiFi module is optional and is powered by a USB port and not by an onboard controller. Firewire, eSATA and lots of USB 2.0 ports are also present for all the connectivity to your digital devices and storage equipment.

Internally, the SN68PTG6 offers one 5.25" bay and two 3.5" drives bays one of which is external and can be used for an internal memory card reader or a floppy drive. The AM2 socket takes any recent AMD CPU in it and while wehavent received any Phenom based CPUs, they should work without any issues. Shuttle also provides two DDR2 slots for memory expansion while one PCI-E x16 slot and one 32-bit PCI slots are provided for internal expansion of a TV Tuner or VGA card. Shuttle continues to use their effective ICE cooling system which works well to keep the internals of the XPC cool.

The front of the XPC hides the drive bays and thus, you get a very nice and clean look. Something that can come in quite handy for the business user is the finger print scanner on the front panel. Instead of using passwords, you can simply swipe your fingers for accessing your data. Besides the scanner, you have a couple of USB ports a firewire port as well as you audio input and output on the front panel. I think an integrated card reader would also be a good idea for the future.