Product Reviews

It must have been tough on Hoover when Dyson started producing vacuum cleaners. Similarly, Shuttle can't have enjoyed it when other manufacturers took the small-form-factor concept bearing its name and made it better. But now Shuttle is back with a new chassis.

The SB81P is the first SFF based on Intel's new 915G chipset and LGA775 processor socket. This means it's also the first to incorporate a PCI Express graphics slot, although Intel's latest Graphics Media Accelerator 900 is also integrated. The Intel chipset offers 7.1 surround sound courtesy of Intel's Azalia audio circuitry, too.

The SB81P is a couple of centimetres taller than previous Shuttles, and this is used to accommodate a media reader at the top. Whereas previous G series chassis had to forfeit the front 3.5in bay for a media reader, the SB81P could still house a floppy drive at the same time. However, the primary function of this 3.5in bay is for a hard disk, which cleverly just clips in - no screws required.

The optical drive is also mounted on two clip-on brackets, while the remaining four brackets are used to fit two further hard disks transversely across the top of the case. To complement these there are four SATA channels, and a RAID configuration is possible with the ICH6R south bridge .

Despite the tool-free design, the SB81P still isn't a piece of cake to construct. Fitting the CPU takes planning. First, the drive cage has to be slid back and lifted out. Next, a plastic duct must be unclipped and removed.

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The four processor HSF screws need to be undone, after which it can be lifted out. Then there's the LGA775 socket itself to contend with and its novel method of CPU installation. The two RAM sockets are fully accessible on the left side though, with the adaptor slots on the right. The PCI Express connector is on the outside edge, so dual-width graphics cards can be fitted at the expense of the single PCI slot.

The Shuttle's cooling system has been completely overhauled. Instead of the single 80mm fan and ICE heat pipe system plus 40mm PSU blower of recent models, there are now no less than five fans. An 80mm and a 70mm serve the more conventional CPU heatpipe, two 60mm units draw air to the back panel, and the PSU has an 80mm one as well. However, they normally run at low revs, so there's only minimal whine. Crank them up, though, and you'll need earplugs.

To test performance, we kitted the SB81P out with a model 520 LGA775 Pentium 4 running at 3.2GHz, 1GB of Geil PC4400 DDR SDRAM and a Western Digital EIDE hard disk. We didn't carry out our usual Halo and UT2004 tests because the graphics chipset isn't powerful enough. And at default clocks, the GMA900 graphics returned a woeful 1,434 in 3DMark03. But the FlasK MPEG DivX encode took an impressive 11 minutes, 48 seconds; we consider anything under 12 minutes pretty good. There was very little to be gained from overclocking though. The FSB can be varied between 100 and 355MHz, the PCIe/PCI bus locked, and there are plenty of voltage settings for the CPU, memory and chipset, but we only managed to get the FSB to 214MHz, even with all voltages on maximum. This increased the 3DMark03 score to 1,462 and shaved 14 seconds off the FlasK MPEG encode.

Despite the poor overclocking, the SB81P goes a long way towards reinstating Shuttle's status, with far more expansion potential than previous models. There's a media reader as standard, it looks good, and it's not too noisy, although it's certainly not silent. But best of all, it supports the next generation of Pentium 4s and PCI Express graphics, making it a safe bet for the future.