Shuttle X27-D Atom dual-core barebones SFF

Like many motherboard manufacturers today, Shuttle uses all solid aluminium capacitors across its board - mostly Sanyo and a few others we haven't been able to track down yet.

The two bonuses Shuttle has upgraded the Atom mini-ITX platform to are: Gigabit Ethernet and DVI out. Compared to the Gigabyte Atom 230 (single core) mini-ITX motherboard which had just 100M Fast Ethernet, this is certainly a modern improvement, and with the inclusion of the Silicon Image digital TDMS we also get dual link DVI out as well - hurrah, dual display is finally possible out of the box!

Despite the lack of a PCI expansion slot, Shuttle's motherboard design is far better than Gigabyte's: the SATA and IDE ports are closer to the edge of the board and the fan pushes air out of the case. It does lack a small southbridge heatsink too, but it still worked fine for us. The downside is that Shuttle uses clips to hold them down - not even push-pins which leaves no holes for potential upgrading.


The dual core Atom CPU is literally just two dies strapped to the same package - it's the same size but the heat output has now (understandably) doubled which makes the CPU cooler slightly bigger. Realtek also powers the audio, but it's basic at best and limited to AC97 - 5.1 audio of average quality with no extra features.

Adding Wireless - the PN20 is modded to fit

The PN20 maybe a USB 2.0 stick by nature, but it's extremely easy to mount internally and poke the antenna out of the back on the rear I/O with very little fiddling. We were going to go the whole hog and drill a hole in the corner, but quite frankly we're lazy and this seemed to work just as well.


When mounted internally, the USB plug can be secured into place with Blu-Tac or hot glue, meaning the Wireless PN20 module can still be easily removed and the internal USB cable can then be neatly routed around the PSU to the other side of the case where it plugs into the available yellow pin-out. Then it's just a matter of the Windows drivers with the provided CD - on condition that Vista hasn't already picked it up because the Realtek chipset used is very popular - and it's now a Shuttle with wireless neatly included. Easy!