Shuttle, the company that has kept the Cube PC concept alive and kicking for many years, has now produced one of the best 'Media Center' PCs currently available, the stunning looking XPC M1000 Media Centre, based around Intel's Pentium M processor.

While many manufacturers claim their Media PCs wouldn't look out of the place in the living room, the M1000 can live up to that claim by being a sleek, low profile unit (44.2 x 35.0 x 7.8cm) clothed in an impeccable high gloss black finish. And yes, a silver finish might attract a few more people, but black is the order of the day at the moment.

Sitting in one of Shuttle's own motherboards is a Pentium M 740 (1.73GHz) CPU ably assisted by Intel's i915PM chipset and half a gigabyte of PC2700 memory, all of which give the M1000 a pretty low SysMark04 SE score of 140, on par with a laptop using the same CPU and memory combination. But worrying about outright performance misses the point of systems like the M1000, as the hardware is used in a different way to a conventional desktop PC.

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The CPU is cooled by one of Shuttle's own heatpipe coolers with just a small fan to help it. Together with the 150W SilentX power supply, this means the system produces around 35dB of noise at full tilt. Unless you're sitting in a very quiet room, this will be hard to notice. Helping keep the noise to a minimum is the Enhanced Intel SpeedStep (EIST) technology that the mobile chip has incorporated into it, which dynamically drops the CPU speed depending on what it is doing.

Shuttle provides two TV Tuner cards with the M1000 so that you can record one channel while watching another. In our review sample both cards were AVerMedia AverTV M133 TV/FM analogue cards, but Shuttle is in the process of changing at least one of these to a Freeview digital card, so it will pay to shop around to get the unit that suits you best.

Sitting below these cards is a 256MB Nvidia GeForce 6600LE graphics card, more useful for its DVI/I and component-out ports than any gaming capabilities, as proved by its 3DMark05 score of 1,565.

Connecting the M1000 to a home network shouldn't pose any problems as it comes with both Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11b/g wireless networking. Also integrated is a rare Creative Live 24-bit 8-channel audio chip.

Storage is provided by a 250GB Seagate SATA drive which might be a bit on the small side for a media centre, but a nice touch is the inclusion of a 2.5-inch drive caddy which allows you to buy an optional second drive to help bulk up the capacity. There's also an 8-in-1 card reader. Burning recorded material onto DVD is another option, thanks to the 4x, Dual Layer, dual format writer.

Also part of the package is a wireless keyboard with integrated trackball and a remote control unit. The pre-installed OS is, as you might expect, Windows Media Center Edition 2005 with Update Rollup 2.

After years of keeping the Small Form Factor (SFF) PC concept alive, Shuttle delivers yet another stunning design with the XPC M1000, probably the best Media Center PC available at this moment in time.