Digital Home Thoughts: Shuttle’s ST62K XPC: Small & Silent

BIOS Tweaks
When I first powered up the machine, I was pleased to see that the system BIOS had detected my hyper-threading CPU and turned on the appropriate BIOS flag. It also indicated there was 32 MB of system memory allocated to the integrated video.


Figure 9: The BIOS identifying my hardware.


Figure 10: Overclocker’s delight!

The BIOS allows for some useful overclocking tweaks – I had never seen the “CPU Over Clock By" option before, but it allows you to specify speed bumps between 1 and 20 mhz. This translates to much more than that though – a 5 mhz speed bump resulted in a CPU overclock of 100 mhz, and a 10 mhz bump gave me a 200 mhz boost up to 3 Ghz. The system wasn’t stable at 3 Ghz however – when I was running the 3D Mark 2003 benchmark, the system would reset itself at the same point each time. A 100 mhz overclock seemed the most stable. If you do plan to overclock, it’s best to move up in 50 mhz increments and test the system like crazy before making another speed bump.

Deathly Quiet
When I first booted the ST62K after installing my hardware, the fan was roaring, and it was every bit as loud as the SB62G I was currently using. However, a few seconds after boot the fan went into a lower RPM mode, and I nearly fell over in shock at how quiet things were. It’s not an exaggeration to say that you’d need to be in a silent room to even know if the ST62K was turned on or not. Yes, it’s that quiet. The fan will only kick into high-speed and ultra-noisy mode when the CPU temperature becomes critical, and will idle back down when things return to normal. With a single hard drive and no PCI card in the system generating additional heat, I doubt I’ll ever hear the fan turn on.

I took a short video using my my Canon S400 camera to demonstrate the sound produced by the multi-speed fan - you'll want to turn your speakers up fairly loud in order to hear the audio properly. In this video, you can hear the volume of the fan when the ST62K first turns on, then it disappears a few seconds later. Even when the camera was right next to the back of the unit, there was no fan noise to speak of (I trimmed that part of the video out to save space). Calling this computer nearly silent not an exaggeration!


Figure 11: The huge external power supply is the secret for a near-silent computer. Why didn't someone think of this sooner?


Figure 12: The power supply connects with an odd-looking cable to the main unit, but the connection is solid and won't fall out.

I have a real grudge against noisy computers, which of course means I have a grudge against almost every computer out there. ;-) I’ve always built machines myself or purchased from a local “white box" vendor, so when I ordered a Dell Inspiron 4100 for my wife, I was in shock at how quiet it was. And, in truth, I was envious that her computer was so quiet while mine roared away. Both my SS51G and SB65G2 Shuttles have been equally loud. On the SS51G I replaced the main system fan with one that was a bit quieter, but the real decibel demon was the power supply fan. It must be a side effect of the power supply being so small, but the fans they used were atrociously loud. So when I heard (or didn’t hear, rather) the ST62K, I wanted very badly to use it as my main computer. Unfortunately, I can’t.