Shuttle DH370 review: A small and useful barebones system

At first glance, it’s easy to get the Shuttle DH370 mixed up with its industrial cousin, the DS77U7. They’re both extremely compact black boxes, with the DH370 coming in slightly smaller but the DS77U7 weighing a fraction less.

READ NEXT: Best mini PCs you can buy

Shuttle DH370 review: Design and setup

While the DS77U7’s processor is fixed and unchangeable, though, the DH370 is a full barebones system – and one that ditches passive cooling in favour of a dual-fan integrated heatsink.

This pulls fresh air in at the top and pushes hot air out of the sides. Once we added, as with other barebones systems sharing its 65W thermal design profile CPU limit, an Intel Core i5-8400 and 16GB of DDR4 RAM, it was no surprise to see the DH370 doing well in the benchmarks.

While it could barely better its passive equivalent in the Superposition gaming benchmark, it trounced it in our image editing, video editing and multitasking benchmarks.

Shuttle DH370 review: Performance

That performance comes at dual cost, however. Under load, the twin fans can get loud, and the presence of ventilation points at both sides means the chassis lacks a vertical mounting option.

A bigger problem is in power draw: with the active cooling keeping the 65W CPU from hitting thermal throttle and an evidently not-terrifically-efficient power supply, the DH370 hit a huge 98.7W under load. Contrast that to its idle draw of 10.2W.

The exterior design includes an interesting blend of new and old connectivity options: an RS232 and combined RS232/RS422/RS485 serial port can be found around the back, rubbing shoulders with two high-speed USB-A 3.1 Gen 2 and two USB-A 3.1 Gen 1 ports – with another two of each located at the front.

There’s also room for a 2.5in SATA drive, which is a welcome change from smaller systems. The design, though, loses a point for its cramped layout. Installation of its components is annoying, requiring that the heatsink is unscrewed and removed to access the RAM and M.2 SSD, as well as the CPU – an awkward setup for later upgrades.

Shuttle DH370 review: Verdict

On balance, however, the DH370 is an effortlessly efficient mini PC that performs as well as you’d hope. It can get a little noisy, and it isn’t the simplest thing to modify, but Shuttle has nonetheless produced a machine compact enough for just about any conceivable use case.