The Tulip C3 takes the idea of a compact PC to the ultimate in compactness. The C3 is housed in a brushed aluminium box that measures a mere 26.6 x 18.8 x 17.2cm and weighs just 4.5kg.

Based around a Shuttle SV25 the C3 is powered by a 1GHz Pentium III (although a P4 version is also made by Shuttle) so performance isn't the key with the C3. But one look at the rear panel shows what really matters - connectivity.

Despite its small size the C3 offers more ports than you'll ever see on a normal sized desktop - mouse, keyboard, serial, VGA, S-Video, parallel, composite video, dual 1394 FireWire, LAN, audio in, audio out - the list is huge. These are all handled by the Shuttle FV24 motherboard which uses VIA's ProSavage PL133 chipset and also supports a single PCI slot.

The hard drive supplied with the C3 is a Maxtor 5,400rpm 20GB unit, not big or fast by today's standards but at least it has an ATA/100 interface.

You won't be tempted to play games on the C3 as the integrated S3 Savage 4 graphics adapter is only powered by 8MB of memory, but it's more than enough to cope with standard office applications.

Tulip supplies the C3 with Windows XP Professional as the pre-installed OS and a basic three-year RTB warranty. For sheer cuteness it's hard to beat this tiny desktop system.