Shuttle Talks Shop and Previews the XPC SH67H3

Shuttle SH67H3 Preview

Manufacturer: Shuttle

Shuttle's new 'H3' chassis is a typical XPC design: a long black cuboid with one external 5.25in bay, one external 3.5in bay and the front-panel ports concealed behind a flap at the bottom. Not that this is bad, as the little box looks beautiful in its brushed aluminium finish, while the four big hex bolts on the front provide a striking appearance to a box that would otherwise look featureless.

If you click on the first image below, you'll see that Shuttle has replaced the old FireWire and USB 2 ports with a far more modern pair of USB 3 ports and an eSATA connector. The Power button is also now a sliver of silver (type that ten times) on the right, while the flush Reset button is hidden behind the front panel, out of accident's way.


You'll find the HDMI and DVI ports on the back, although there's no D-Sub connector. These are also joined by four USB 2 ports, two more USB 3 ports, another eSATA connector, a Gigabit Ethernet socket and the jacks for 7.1-channel surround. You'll also find an S/PDIF-out included at the top as well. After years of experience building XPCs, Shuttle clearly understands the limitations of its box versus the needs of some of its customers. The many eSATA and USB 3 ports serve to add extra drives beyond the chassis' capacity without causing a performance drop. Note that you can also use both digital video connections at once too (at long last, Intel).


Once you get inside, you'll see that the board packs four DDR3 DIMM slots, a full PCI-E 16x slot, one 1x PCI-E slot and even a mini PCI-E slot too. This enables you to add wireless cards without using up the PCI-E 1x space. To keep the cost down, Shuttle doesn't include this as standard, however.

Meanwhile, the internals provide space for two 3.5in hard drives, although one of the bays has an external front, so you'll have to choose between a second hard drive, or a 3.5in fan controller or card reader.


As ever, Shuttle has also equipped the box with its its ICE triple-heatpipe heatsink with a 92mm fan, and the motherboard can take any LGA1155 CPU on the market (up to a TDP of 95W). Since the H67 chipset doesn't allow overclocking, Shuttle hasn't had to worry about people blowing up its basic 3+1-phase VRM system either. While the board mostly uses solid aluminium-capped capacitors, unfortunately the VRM chokes are still very old-style. Meanwhile, the included 300W PSU is 80Plus Bronze rated, but can still handle 32A across its two 12V rails for gaming graphics cards.

The SH67H3 is scheduled to be available at the end at the end of March, once Intel's B3-silicon PCH is readily available, although Shuttle will be showing off this SH67H3 during the CeBIT trade show next week.