To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more

Shuttle SH61R4 review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £222
inc VAT

A good Sandy Bridge barebones, but Shuttle's SH67H3 is better value

The Shuttle SH67H3 was the first Intel LGA1155 barebones we’d seen. Its HDMI video and optical S/PDIF outputs made it suitable for building a media centre PC with an Intel Sandy Bridge processor, and its twin drive bays and RAID support meant you could back up your media files easily.

Shuttle SH61R4

This SH61R4 is a slightly cheaper version, with a similar specification but some subtle changes that make it more suitable as a general-purpose home or office PC. Gone are the HDMI and S/PDIF ports, but you do get both DVI-I and DVI-D ports, so you can connect two DVI monitors, or one DVI and one VGA monitor, and run them from the Sandy Bridge processor’s integrated graphics. There’s also no RAID support, and while the SD67H3 had two USB3 ports on the front and rear, the SH61R4 only has rear-mounted USB3 and makes do with USB on the front.

Shuttle SH61R4 ports

The SH61R4 has room for an optical drive and two hard disks, and is easy to put together – the drive tray comes out easily to make it simple to screw in your storage, and the SATA cables are routed neatly around the top of the case. The barebones’ motherboard is a custom design, but it is possible to fit a replacement Mini-ITX Intel model – the SH61R4’s processor cooler has standard LGA1155 mounting feet. This essentially turns the barebones into a very expensive case, but it’s useful to have the option of an upgrade in the future.

There are only two RAM slots, compared to the four in the SH67H3, so you’re limited to 8GB rather than 16GB RAM – most people shouldn’t have a problem with this, though. If you find the limited graphics performance of a Sandy Bridge chip isn’t enough, you can fit a double-slot PCI Express graphics card, and the case is long enough for any ATI or Nvidia cards currently available. However, you’ll lose the single PCI Express x1 expansion slot if you do this, and the case only comes with a single six-pin PCI Express power connector. You could use a Molex-to-PCI Express power adaptor, but as the power supply is only rated at 250W (compared to 300W in the SH67H3) you won’t be able to use particularly powerful cards such as the AMD Radeon HD 6950.

Shuttle SH61R4 interior

When fitted with our reference Intel Core i5-2500K processor and 4GB RAM, the SH61R4 system managed 95 overall in our benchmarks – five points fewer than our reference PC, which uses the same processor; Shuttle’s motherboard seems to be slowing the system down slightly, but it’s not a huge performance hit. The SH61R4 is a competent barebones, but it suffers in comparison to the SH67H3, which is only slightly more expensive, has a more powerful power supply, front-mounted USB3 ports and an optical S/PDIF output, and can be used with two DVI monitors with a £10 HDMI to DVI adaptor.

Details

Price £222
Rating ***
Processor socket LGA1155
Processor support 2nd generation Intel Core i3, i5, i7
Processor heatsink supplied yes
Memory slots 2
Supported memory type DDR3 1333
Memory 8GB
Dual-channel support yes
Form factor custom/Mini-ITX
Chipset north bridge Intel H61
Chipset south bridge Intel H61
Passively-cooled north bridge yes
Graphics Processor none
Graphics Memory 0MB
Graphics memory type N/A

Ports

USB2 ports (front/rear) 2/8
Firewire ports (front/rear) 0/0
Legacy ports none
Graphics/video ports DVI-I, DVI-D
Other ports none

Internal Expansion

Size 190x215x325mm
PCI slots 0
PCI-E x1 slots 1
PCI-E x4 slots 0
PCI-E x16 slots 1
Dual 3D architecture none
IDE ports 0
Serial ATA ports 4
RAID drives N/A
Floppy ports 0
3.5in drive bays 2
5.25in drive bays 1
Other bays none

Features

Wired network ports 1x 10/100/1000
Wireless networking support none
Sound IDT92HD89C
Sound outputs 5.1 line out, headphone, microphone
Speaker configuration 5.1
Supported memory cards none
Power supply wattage 250W
Cables included 3x SATA, 4x SATA power, 2x Molex power, 1x PCI Express power
Power consumption standby 2W
Power consumption idle 32W
Power consumption active 101W

Buying Information

Price £222
Supplier http://www.morecomputers.com
Details uk.shuttle.com

Read more

Reviews