There's little reason these days why a PC has to occupy a substantial amount of space on your desk. Given the miniature system boards now available and the variety of small format cases, you can pack a lot into a PC not much bigger than a six-pack.

Just such a PC is this NX-Station, built into a Shuttle SpaceCube case with its brushed aluminium finish and front and back panels packed with drives and sockets. The system unit is based on an Athlon XP 2400+, partnered by 512MB of fast memory. Add in an 80GB hard drive and you have the basis of a PC of which most midi-tower owners would be proud.

There's a CD-RW/DVD combo drive for removable storage and, although there's no room in the case for a secondary drive to enable disc-to-disc copying, there's no reason why you shouldn't attach an external drive through one of the many USB2 or FireWire ports on the NX-Station.

The latest Shuttle system boards include an AGP slot for a third party graphics card and CCL has taken advantage of this to fit an ATI All-in-Wonder 9000 Pro video adapter. As well as providing strong 3D performance for game players - the games modules in 3DMark never dropped below 30fps - this card includes a TV tuner, so the system immediately becomes an extra TV, as well as an entertainment PC.

The graphics card drives a 17-inch CTX LCD monitor, which gives a sharp, well-formed picture without taking an excessive footprint on the desk. With an LCD, of course, 17-inch means 17-inch across its viewable diagonal, so its picture is closer to the size of some 19-inch conventional CRT monitors.

Sound comes from the six-channel C-Media chip on the NX-Station's system board, which is no great shakes, but it does drive a set of the latest VideoLogic ZXR550 speakers. These speakers have a redesigned set of filters and crossovers and provide better frequency separation and presence than even the ZXR500s, which they replace.

Other test results show that the computer is capable of running any of the mainstream applications you might want to throw at it. It also makes a fair attempt at more taxing tasks, such as video editing. A three-year warranty, with the first year collect and return and the other two years back-to-base (labour only), is better than the statutory minimum, although the five-day turnaround is on the slow side.

CCL bundles Ability Office 2002 and Pinnacle Studio 8 with the NX-Station, making it a very useful home or home office PC.

You don't have to spend huge amounts of money or clear the dining-room table to fit a powerful PC in your home any more. The NX-Station offers excellent performance and versatility - including TV - in a compact SpaceCube case. Maybe it marks the beginning of the end for the standard big beige box.