Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Just when you think you've got it all in a PC platform. Shuttle gives you more! The Shuttle SX58H7 Pro Station packs amazing performance into a mini glossy aluminum enclosure to reach "work hard and play hard" goals of extreme gamers, demand enthusiasts and mainstream PC users."

This is the Shuttle I've been waiting for. I've been wanting to build an Intel Core i7-based system since I saw the first monstrously awesome benchmarks for the Core i7 line of CPUs. I do quite a bit of video editing, and rendering out a final 720p or 1080p file takes forever, so I welcome any technology that will speed that process up. Four cores, each hyper-threaded? That's just...awesome. At any rate, I have limited space for my media editing computer, so I was looking to another Shuttle to replace this one. The SX58H7 features the Intel X58 Express Chipset, has a power supply fan that's 5cm bigger (which should mean better airflow and lower RPMs), supports ATI's CrossFireX or NVIDIA's SLI for dual video cards, and has four RAM slots - but you'd only want to fill up three of those in order to get maximum performance from triple-channel RAM. Read more...

Product Category: Barebones computer (XPC)

Manufacturer: Shuttle

Where to Buy: NewEgg

Price: $371.71 USD

System Requirements: The SD39P2 is a case, motherboard, and power supply. You need to add a CPU, RAM, hard drive, optical drive, and video card.

Specifications: 325(L) x 210(W) x 220(H) mm in size. 400 watt power supply, Intel 975X + ICH7R chipset, 4 x 240 pin DDR2 DIMM Slots, 2GB per DIMM (Max 8GB), Dual Channel DDR2 533/667/800 with ECC supported. Full specifications on the Shuttle product page.

Pros:

• Superb industrial design - it looks fantastic;
• Four slots for RAM, up to 8 GB supported;
• Eight USB ports, three hard drive bays, one e-SATA port - it's loaded.

Cons:

• No memory card reader included;
• RAID setup a frustrating mess;
• Not exactly quiet compared to some computers.

Summary: My goal was to create a powerful small form-factor media editing machine, primarily used in editing RAW photos and high-definition video footage. I used the latest and greatest Shuttle - the SD39P2 XPC - when I started this project, combined it with the best that Intel, Kingston, and Western Digital had to offer, and ended up with a screamer of a machine. Read more...