Shuttle SS21T

Final Thoughts

For the price it's certainly not a bad system in terms of looks or even performance, but internally you unfortunately get what you pay for. The careful internal optimisation of Shuttle XPCs has spoiled us into assuming the same would be the case here, and it just isn't.

You have to remind yourself that for just a shade over £90 you could have a PSU, mini tower case and motherboard that are designed to be used together. It's generally a lot harder to source non-ATX components and get them to fit together perfectly, but surprisingly even Shuttle has problems in its own chassis and motherboard.

It's not too bad if you're prepared to do your own internal cable routing and adjustments, although Shuttle could have given this a little more thought by including a rounded floppy cable and far shorter IDE cable.

AMD is heavily pushing its own (open) DTX standard, so maybe future systems will be based around that rather than the problematic nanoBTX specification. This will make a system more upgradable without having to buy a new chassis every time you want to upgrade. As it stands though, as the only major nanoBTX supporter Shuttle forces the end user to upgrade the entire chassis at the end of its life cycle.

A massive positive note is to simply highlight that everything works. Traditionally, cheap systems shouldn't be touched with a barge pole as they often inhabit a nest of problems and hardware incompatibilities when you come to use them. In contrast, despite the physical hardware restrictions on memory, coolers and graphics cards, everything we could drop in worked just fine.

The performance may be far from the best we've ever seen overall, but in some scenarios it's as good as the representative Athlon 64 FX-62 system based on the more expensive Asus Crosshair motherboard that is targeted at gaming enthusiasts. However, despite the fact the integrated northbridge in the CPU should provide a consistent playing ground, the memory performance of the Shuttle is far less even with a discrete graphics card.

We can't recommend using the on-board graphics in any situation though: not only is it blurry but it cripples performance in certain cases. Additionally it only supports DirectX 7 and thus will not run Aeroglass in Windows Vista.

System Building

Comparatively, the cheapest complete Dell system you can buy of similar specification is the Dimension E521, which retails at £349 (inc VAT). This gets you a AMD Athlon X2 3600+ AM2, Nvidia motherboard, 1GB 533MHz DDR2 memory, 160GB 7200RPM hard drive, 19" 1280x1024 TFT, 16x DVD-RW drive and Vista Home Premium.

Alternatively a system you can buy including the Shuttle SS21T as your base is £46 for an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+, £38 for 1GB of DDR2 800 Geil Value Ram, £21 for a DVD writer, £120 for a Viewsonic 19" TFT, £38 for a Seagate 7200.10 (latest version, low profile and cooler) hard drive and finally your choice of OS, whether it be Vista or XP for another £100.

That's around £350 (inc VAT) excluding an OS for the Shuttle system, which is where Dell's purchasing power comes into its own. For around the same price, including Vista Home Premium and GeForce 7300 GS TurboCache (which is barely better than on-board video) you could buy the Dell. Although with the Dell you'd suffer a slightly slower CPU, slightly slower hard drive and generic DDR2-533MHz memory as opposed to branded DDR2-800MHz memory.

Now that Shuttle is in the mini-tower barebones realm, it also faces competition from the likes of another industry big gun, Asus. Its Vintage V3 M2V890 undercuts Shuttles SS21T by around £20, making it even more bargainous. The differences are actually quite significant on paper, where the Asus supports a PCI-Express x16, two PCI slots, a PCI-Express x1, four hard drive bays and Gigabit Ethernet.

Of course, we're yet to look at the Asus for build quality and performance but it seems like Shuttle might have a tough time convincing people to invest in its SS21T when the two are side by side. Shuttle does have its pedigree in XPCs to sway people down its path, but Asus has another trick up its sleeve in the Asus Vintage V3 P5945G which is again available for less than the SS21T and is Core 2 capable. Add into the mix the Intel Core 2 Duo E2140 at just £58 (inc VAT) and decent P945 chipset and you've got some serious competition on your hands.

Overclocking

Due to the lack of multiplier and voltage adjustment we were severely limited to the CPUs ability to cope with a pure increment in MHz. Our FX-62 managed a stable 216MHz bus overclock to provide a respectable 3GHz overall CPU speed. It's understandable that Shuttle has concentrated on engineering the system to work well rather than overclocking given the intended purchasing audience.

Also considering the heat build up in the bottom of the case, the lack of voltage adjustments which will increase the heat output is also a wise decision. However, a slight redesign to move the PSU to the top and to include some fans front and rear would alleviate this problem greatly.

Stability

We had to drop the memory timings from 4-4-4-12 to 5-5-5-15 during stability testing and the system heated up a lot despite the extra internal capacity over XPCs. The constricted use of a (small) retail cooler meant the CPU became noisy and hot. Add to this the small fans on the northbridge and 7600 GT and you've got yourself a noisy system. Despite the lack of airflow though, things remained completely stable once the memory timings were set correctly.

Warranty

The warranty is for two year and is equivalent to what Asus offers on its barebones system. The SS21T should be returned to the reseller in the UK on both years. Depending on who you buy it from will depend on how quickly you get it back; whether your retailer will require the same unit sent back to Germany for fixing and then forwarding it onto you, or they might just send you an entirely new product to replace it.

However, If you were to buy a complete Shuttle XPC through the "Shuttle Systems Configurator", Shuttle then offers you a direct, collect and return RMA service. Yet again, you get what you pay for it seems, however two years is still better than the UK legal standard of just one.

Conclusion

As long as you don't use the on-board video, Shuttle has made something that performs well for the price. However,
even though it may appear a fantastic bargain a quick search of the net highlights a competitive market Shuttle is trying to sell into.

Unfortunately Shuttle is stuck between a rock and a hard place: its XPC range is too expensive but fantastically built and the cheaper T-chassis range is larger and falls into a more saturated marketplace of equally cheap barebones. In all, it may not be the cheapest out there, but it still makes for a very capable budget system that works.

• Build Quality
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• 6/10

• Features
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• -
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• 6/10

• IGP Performance
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• -
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• 2/10

• Discrete Perf.
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• -
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• 7/10

• Value
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• -
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• 7/10

• Overall
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• -
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• 6/10

What do these scores mean?