VeryPC claims its Treeton Performance draws just 29W when idle.

However, we rarely saw that due to Vista’s excessive hard disk use.

When you’re working on the PC, you’ll often see 60W usage, although this is still considerably less than most desktops, which draw 100W.

The Treeton is encased in an all-metal Noah mITX case to help dissipate heat, although it could get very warm to the touch in places.

Its games console size makes it easy to carry (weighing 3.9kg all in), but despite this it still has a DVD writer, 100GB hard disk (both are notebook form factor) and lots of ports.

These include four USB ports, HDMI and VGA outputs on the rear and two USB ports and one Firewire port behind a silver metal door on the front.

AMD’s high-end processors have high energy consumptions, but at the low end of the market it has some competitive designs, including the BE-2400 used here. The BE-2400 has two 2.3GHz cores, 1MB of L2 cache and an impressive 45W TDP.

It powered the system to a respectable 3,749 overall in PCmark05 and 4,528 in the CPU section, so it will perform well during office tasks. The Treeton is also fine as a standard-definition entertainment PC, but its Radeon X1200 won’t deal with games or high-definition video very well.

A one-year warranty is included as standard, which can be increased to five years by annually renewing Kaspersky anti-virus through VeryPC at a cost of £25. It’s an interesting package, although the same software costs around £7 per year if you buy elsewhere.

Small form factor components aren’t as cheap or easy to assemble as the full-size components found in most desktops and so you’ll pay a premium for systems such as this. But it’s an interesting product nonetheless.