Shuttle SH67H3 review

Shuttle bills the SH67H3 as a good basis for a media centre PC. It only makes a slight hum at idle, it has an HDMI port to carry sound and video to most AV equipment and there’s an optical S/PDIF output, but there are only enough analogue sound outputs for 5.1 rather than 7.1 surround sound. The twin hard disk bays mean you can fit a standard hard disk for TV recordings and an SSD for the system disk, which will help keep the noise down.

Once we’d fitted our reference Intel Core i5-2500K processor and 4GB RAM, the SH67H3 gained a score of 95 in our benchmarks, which is slightly behind our reference PC but certainly acceptable. Graphics performance from the i5-2500K’s built-in 3D hardware was as poor as expected, but it’s easy to upgrade the SH67H3 to make a compact gaming PC – there’s enough room in the case for a long, double-slot graphics card such as AMD’s Radeon HD 6950.

The SH67H3 is easy to build and has room for expansion, but is an expensive barebones – around twice the price of an LGA1155 model from Asus, even though its barebones are bigger and nowhere near as smart-looking. Once you add a Core i5-2500K processor, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a DVD writer, 1TB hard disk and Windows 7 Home Premium, building a PC around the SH67H3 would cost you around £535. Once you add a monitor, this makes it around £100 more expensive than an equivalent pre-built PC such as the Dino PC Jurassic 2500. However, it is a great-looking, compact and well-designed barebones, so if you’re short on space it’s worth the premium.