Shuttle SH67H3 review

Shuttle’s SH67H3 is a Socket LGA1155 barebones, so will accept any of Intel’s latest generation of Sandy Bridge processors. It’s almost exactly the same size and shape as other barebones systems in Shuttle’s XPC range, but packs in a comprehensive specification and room for upgrades.

The SH67H3 is a smart brushed black metal box, with a slightly different design from Shuttle boxes designed for Intel’s previous-generation Core processors such as the SH55J2. There’s no flap covering either the optical drive or the ports at the bottom of the unit, which are now recessed slightly, possibly to make them less vulnerable to spills when the box is sitting on your desk.

When building the barebones, we preferred not having a flap over the optical drive – it made fitting a DVD writer much easier. The barebones itself is very easy to build. The heatsink screws in over the processor, and heatpipes connect the chip’s cooling block to a fan on the rear of the case. The optical drive and up to two hard disks screw into a cage which you slide into the top of the chassis, and two SATA cables route around the top of the chassis so are out of the way. There’s only room for these two cables in the dedicated cable tidy channel, though, so if you have three drives you’ll have to make sure the last cable doesn’t block your airflow.

The barebones has two SATA3 and two SATA2 ports and supports RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10, so if you fit multiple hard disks you’re free to choose between speed, data redundancy or a compromise between the two. You’re also spoilt for choice for fast external storage, with two USB3 ports on the front and the rear – one of the USB2 ports on the front and rear also doubles as an eSATA port. To set up RAID you’ll have to use the old-school BIOS, though – there’s no fancy UEFI-based setup here.

Shuttle bills the SH67H3 as a good basis for a media centre PC. It only makes a slight hum at idle, it has an HDMI port to carry sound and video to most AV equipment and there’s an optical S/PDIF output, but there are only enough analogue sound outputs for 5.1 rather than 7.1 surround sound. The twin hard disk bays mean you can fit a standard hard disk for TV recordings and an SSD for the system disk, which will help keep the noise down.

Once we’d fitted our reference Intel Core i5-2500K processor and 4GB RAM, the SH67H3 gained a score of 95 in our benchmarks, which is slightly behind our reference PC but certainly acceptable. Graphics performance from the i5-2500K’s built-in 3D hardware was as poor as expected, but it’s easy to upgrade the SH67H3 to make a compact gaming PC – there’s enough room in the case for a long, double-slot graphics card such as AMD’s Radeon HD 6950.

The SH67H3 is easy to build and has room for expansion, but is an expensive barebones – around twice the price of an LGA1155 model from Asus, even though its barebones are bigger and nowhere near as smart-looking. Once you add a Core i5-2500K processor, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a DVD writer, 1TB hard disk and Windows 7 Home Premium, building a PC around the SH67H3 would cost you around £535. Once you add a monitor, this makes it around £100 more expensive than an equivalent pre-built PC such as the Dino PC Jurassic 2500. However, it is a great-looking, compact and well-designed barebones, so if you’re short on space it’s worth the premium.