Shuttle SS21T review

1 of 2

Gallery

Verdict:

Review Date: 19 Feb 2007

Price when reviewed: £100

Supplier: http://www.ebuyer.com

Reviewed By: Chris Finnamore

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

User Rating

ExpertReviews Award

Shuttle's SS21T is an unusual system. It's only slightly shorter than a standard PC mini tower and is around the same width. It's a lot less deep, though, so it'll take up less room on or under your desk.

It comes with a fold-out sheet of instructions rather than a full manual. The instructions are easy to follow, and with loads of room inside the case it's easy to build. There's space for two optical drives and two hard disks, and the flaps on the front that cover the optical drives work perfectly. You can fit IDE or SATA hard disks, and you can configure two SATA disks as a RAID 0 or 1 array. Considering the size of the case, it's a shame Shuttle couldn't squeeze in a third hard disk like Biostar's iDEQ 250N. The SS21T is also noisy. It makes about as much noise as a desktop PC when idle.

The SS21T has a basic specification, but it would be well suited as an office PC. Like all the systems here with integrated graphics, it can't play modern 3D games unless you fit a graphics card. When we fitted our standard graphics card in its PCI-E x16 slot, it ran our Call of Duty 2 test at 26fps. This is a little slower than the two gaming systems here. It was marginally the fastest socket-AM2 system in our application benchmarks.

Shuttle's SS21T has room for expansion, is easy to build and good value. It's our Best Buy if you want to build a PC for office or internet use.

Prev Next

Get more reviews, tutorials and in-depth advice, every month with Computer Shopper.
Click here to try 3 issues for £1