I recently posted a thread (http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2136198) about how good we'd really expect a 250W power supply found in a typical Shuttle PC to be. Well, thanks to my long-term Shuttle fettish I went ahead and picked up the Shuttle SG41J1, and so now its time for me to give something back to the forums by describing my experiences.
The barebones itself is for socket 775 - i.e. that dead Core2Duo/Quad socket that nobody in their right mind would buy now. It has the peculiar addition of DDR3 - I guess at this point this isn't a bad thing as DDR3 is cheap and clocks well. The people at Shuttle have finally seen sense and put the PCI-Express x16 socket the right way around so that you can fit a double-slot graphics card.
There aren't many decent reviews of this box online already - in fact the only halfway decent one is at LanOC (http://lanoc.org/review/hardware/pc-hardware/3723-shuttle-sg41j1-plus). They have some nice images that make me feel less bad about not taking so many photos. There are a few very important points that they don't touch on though, so I'm going to try and suppliment their experiences here.
My build then is as follows:
Shuttle SG41J1
Intel Core2Quad Q8400
PowerColor Radeon HD5770 driving a 1920x1200 monitor
2 x 2GB Kingston DDR3-1600
2 x Samsung EcoGreen F4 2TB
30GB OCZ Vertex SSD
Windows 7 Home Premium
I've gone mad, clearly, but I've done away with my old desktop rig completely and now this is my "only" PC (save for the essentials - Netbook for when I'm away from home, and my other Shuttle that lives in my office at work so that I can play Minecraft at lunchtimes.) So now I've traded down from a Phenom II @ 3.8GHz and a Radeon 5850 to a shoebox, though admittedly a reasonably capable one. I've made the reasonably sane decision that 4TB storage should be enough for anyone, but when 3TB drives get cheap enough I expect I will be upgrading.
The SG41J1 itself is cheap - in local money only £99.99. That gets you the case, motherboard and PSU, which for a Shuttle PC feels like a pretty solid deal. This is a departure from the more expensive Shuttles of old, and you can see where money's been saved. Where once Shuttle PCs were carved almost entirely from aluminium, this one is cheapy steel, but with a reasonably nice finish. The front has a very shiny checker-board pattern that looks better in real life than it photographs. In reality it's more subtle and mirror-like than any of the pictures I've seen, including this one I just took.
It's a bit bigger than the older Shuttles, but just barely. . .a touch wider. Apparently it now accomodates a standard mini-ITX motherboard so it should be upgradable one day. Whether any other motherboard will have the right headers for the Shuttle case's connectors is another question.
COOLING
Also gone is Shuttle's "standard" ICE heatpipe cooler that would usually channel heat to a heatsink covering the single rear 92mm fan. There's a further issue that the CPU socket now sits underneath the power supply, so you can have anything too tall, and the northbridge heatsink means you can't have anything too wide either. There are a few heatsinks out there that will fit, but I couldn't find any still easily available. You can buy a version of the funky Shuttle ICE cooler, but it is specific to this J series chassis.
To be honest, I don't think it's a big deal. The motherboard comes with a warning of horrible suffering if you dare to use a CPU with more than 95W TDP, and in my case the standard stock Intel heatsink has done a fine job for that. I was lucky enough to have a copper-cored monstrosity that had come with a fire-breathing Pentium D cpu I once owned. Oh, and forget about overclocking - but we'll get to that later.
There is one benefit to using this kind of cooler. Older Shuttles relied on convection through the case to cool motherboard components, and suffered temperature build-up if you ran with the case lid off. The stock Intel fan does at least spread some air around regardless.
When I first looked at doing a build in this Shuttle I did consider a Pentium Dual-Core, because they're cheap and they overclock like little else I've experienced. In the end though I didn't fancy giving up on having a quad, and managed to get a bargain Q8400 on eBay for barely more than the price of a new dualie. It's idling at about 39C and peaking at about 55C under Prime, maybe 52C or so under quad-core gaming load (GTA4/Bad Company 2)
GRAPHICS CARDS
Dual-slot cards are now a reality - older Shuttle designs have put the PCIe x16 slot on the outside of the case, for reasons I've never managed to fathom. The other problem with graphics cards inside a Shuttle PC though is cooling them, and this hasn't changed a great deal. They've made the ventilation holes in the sides of the case lid larger this time around, but they're still not ideal, and they're in the wrong place - i.e. too low. I am seriously considering modifying that side of the case - either cutting a big panel out of the side and covering with some mesh, or just drilling a bunch of holes to allow some more air in.
With the case side off the GPU I'm using (Radeon 5770) hits 50C at full load, and with it on you get 65C - neither is a problem in the grand scheme of things, but if you wanted to run anything hotter it could be an issue. More than that, you can tell the thing isn't "breathing" right because as soon as you slide the lid on the GPU fan spins up faster at the sudden reduced air resistance, just the same as if you were to cover it with your hand.
I'm using a 5770 by PowerColor with an old-fashioned great-big-wide-heatsink kind of design. It's a single-slot design that takes two slots by virtue of its enormous cooler. The idea was to get the intake fan a bit further from the edge of the case, but in reality it's still too close for comfort. You may also notice an expertly crafted bit of ducting (a piece of white card) that's directing some of the air from the heatsink out of the back of the case through an uncovered PCI-slot. With the limited cooling this case has I think a rear-blowing graphics card is a good plan, and this little mod has dropped my CPU temperature while gaming by about 5C too as the heat buildup was that bad.
Another point to note, circled in blue on the picture above, is a little header that connects the power button on the front panel to the motherboard. I tried to mount my old Radeon 5850 in the case, but it wouldn't fit - not because it was too long, but because this header stopped the card from pushing down into the slot. Any big rectangular-box design graphics cards may fall foul of this. In the end the 5850 was never going to run reliably on the power supply anyway, so it wasn't a great loss.
SOUND
This board uses an apparently obscure sound chip made by IDT. Windows 7 has some built in drivers for this that work well - this is important, because the driver included on the CD that comes with the Shuttle has issues.
The driver and software that Shuttle Provide do give you some extra features - a program that sits in the taskbar and tells you when you've plugged headphones in, and presumably this allows reconfiguration of the 3 ports on the back to give you the promised 5.1 channel output. However, my experience of the bundled driver was that it ate 9% of my CPU at all times, for no apparent good reason.
Killing the process stopped useful things, like detection of when I'd plugged in my headphones. Rolling back to the Windows 7 default driver fixed this, and it still detects my headphones.
Quality-wise the on-board sound seems okay, but I've still not given it a proper comparison with my X-FI, particularly on how good the 3D-positional sound is. Thankfully I have a USB X-FI card - if I wanted to use a PCI one I'd be out of luck, as my only PCI slot is blocked by graphics card.
POWER SUPPLY
While we're on the subject, the power supply unit itself is a bit of an unknown quantity. There are myths about Shuttle PSUs being able to power all kinds of stuff that you wouldn't expect - and Shuttle's website does claim you can run both a 95W CPU and a 5850 on the standard power supply, but I don't buy that for a moment. The PSU here isn't one of Shuttle's own "SilentX" units either, but a unit made by ElanPower, whoever that is.
It's not terribly noisy, but not silent either. It only has 16A on the 12V line, but so far it's powering Q8400 and HD5770 without any issues. It never gets particularly hot even when pushed, and never gets very noisy either. I still plan to perhaps upgrade it at some point, but for now it's getting the job done. There isn't much else to say as power supply testing is a game for people with the right knowledge and equipment. Let's just say I'm not going to be running Prime and Furmark at the same time.
STORAGE
Hard disks:
The case uses the standard Shuttle design for holding drives - two 3.5" bays with a 5.25" bay above. In years gone by when hard disks were nuclear powered it was verging on suicidal to put a hard disk in both slots, but these days it's not so bad. I've got two Samsung EcoGreen F4's in there, which have the virtue of not really getting warm at all, even when packed in close together.
When using both 3.5" bays, the lower one is rather close to my CPU cooler, and I had to use a right-angle-connector SATA cable to get the cable to fit. This introduces one of the other fun little games you often find when building small form-factor machines - there quickly evolves a "correct order" in which you have to assemble all the parts so that things don't get in each others' way.
Optical Drive:
The DVD drive sits on top - now, LanOC made small mention of it being awkward to mount properly, but they didn't do the issue justice. Essentially, the button on the front panel to open the DVD drive is not actually in front of the drive itself. A long plastic arm transfers your button-push to the drive's open/close button. My experience is, even when as perfectly fitted as possible, the button seems flimsy and doesn't feel right, but does "work". However, I've found it just as easy to gently press on the front of the case where I know the DVD drive's open/close button is. Also "amusing" is that until I got placement of the drive just right the tray would open and close at the slightest touch, bump of the table, or worse, sometimes just randomly. Haunted DVD drives are annoying.
SSD
One of the fun parts of any PC build featuring a 2.5" Solid State Drive is figuring out where to attach it. In a normal PC case you might use adapters, or velcro, or duct-tape, but the Shuttle is short on space. I originally planned to mount it underneath the 3.5" bays, somehow attached to the bottom (probably with velcro), but in the end I wanted to route SATA cables down here and with the other motherboard headers and cables below there wasn't really the space.
Fortunately Shuttle's engineers have accidently provided a perfect mounting location - at least, I don't think it was by design. The plastic front panel of the case is held on by 4 lugs that are easily unfastened, and there's a nice gap behind it.
Those pointless ventilation holes in the front panel (pointless since the plastic panel is solid, leaving no way for air to get in) finally come in useful, with a single screw fastening into the bottom of the SSD holding the drive steady. The SATA power and data cables add a little tension to the other end, and suddenly everything is secure. The front panel pops back on and we're done. It's almost as if it were designed for it - if they'd just add a few properly spaced screw-holes on this front panel it'd be a marketable feature.
CHIPSET & BIOS
Finally, a few words about the Chipset and BIOS on this board. It uses a G41 chipset which is a bargain-basement solution. It's well reported that this chipset tops out at about 340MHz Frontside Bus, and a quick check confirmed this - 340 seems stable, 342 will not POST. This means that if you have a 1333MHz FSB processor, you're not going to be overclocking it.
BIOS options are not great for overclocking either. The major issue I have is that there is NO control for the CPU multiplier, not up OR down, you're stuck with the default. That would seriously limit your options when overclocking a Pentium Dual-Core for instance as you're basically left with only the FSB to tweak. However, with DDR3 rather than DDR2 perhaps it wouldn't be so much of an issue, as keeping the memory in-spec shouldn't be so difficult when it can run at 1600MHz or so if needs be.
The southbridge on this board is a relatively old ICH7. It has no RAID and no AHCI support, so my SSD is stuck at a Windows Experience Index rating of 6.9 - oh noes! It doesn't make a great deal of real-world difference as far as I can tell though.
CONCLUSIONS
I like this box. My main gaming rig is now the size of a shoebox and it still runs everything, even with a lowly spec of a Q8400 at stock speed and a Radeon 5770. And by everything it means I'm still playing GTA4 quite happily, and Crysis Warhead ran smoothly, albeit at "Gamer" settings rather than "Enthusiast". I'm honestly not missing my Radeon 5850 and I was rather surprised when I arrived at that conclusion.
Everything works well and is stable. There are some nightmare reviews of this Shuttle on NewEgg, with people complaining of apparently Dead-on-Arrival PCs and memory incompatibility problems, sometimes fixed with a bios update (there is such an update on Shuttle's website that claims memory compatibility fixes.) Thankfully I had no such issues - perhaps (hopefully) new stock has the latest bios already flashed.
I have some longer-term concerns about how long the PSU is going to last, as I think my demands on it when gaming are going to be somewhere around the 90% load mark. Better quality units are available fairly easily so I'm likely to look into it at some point, particularly as that will let me upgrade GPU to something a bit better. Hoping the Q8400 should stay usable for a while yet with the right graphics card - which also means taking care to get one that will definitely fit.
In value terms I still rate this Shuttle as excellent. Trading down (mostly in size, not all that much in performance) hasn't cost me anything once I've got all my old components eBayed away. Big LAN party is only a few weeks away, and when this box needs to retire it will make a kick-ass media centre.
This has been a <TL : DR> production. Today's episode was brought to you by the letters X, P, C and the number 775. . . . blah blah Children's Television Workshop.
The barebones itself is for socket 775 - i.e. that dead Core2Duo/Quad socket that nobody in their right mind would buy now. It has the peculiar addition of DDR3 - I guess at this point this isn't a bad thing as DDR3 is cheap and clocks well. The people at Shuttle have finally seen sense and put the PCI-Express x16 socket the right way around so that you can fit a double-slot graphics card.
There aren't many decent reviews of this box online already - in fact the only halfway decent one is at LanOC (http://lanoc.org/review/hardware/pc-hardware/3723-shuttle-sg41j1-plus). They have some nice images that make me feel less bad about not taking so many photos. There are a few very important points that they don't touch on though, so I'm going to try and suppliment their experiences here.
My build then is as follows:
Shuttle SG41J1
Intel Core2Quad Q8400
PowerColor Radeon HD5770 driving a 1920x1200 monitor
2 x 2GB Kingston DDR3-1600
2 x Samsung EcoGreen F4 2TB
30GB OCZ Vertex SSD
Windows 7 Home Premium
I've gone mad, clearly, but I've done away with my old desktop rig completely and now this is my "only" PC (save for the essentials - Netbook for when I'm away from home, and my other Shuttle that lives in my office at work so that I can play Minecraft at lunchtimes.) So now I've traded down from a Phenom II @ 3.8GHz and a Radeon 5850 to a shoebox, though admittedly a reasonably capable one. I've made the reasonably sane decision that 4TB storage should be enough for anyone, but when 3TB drives get cheap enough I expect I will be upgrading.
The SG41J1 itself is cheap - in local money only £99.99. That gets you the case, motherboard and PSU, which for a Shuttle PC feels like a pretty solid deal. This is a departure from the more expensive Shuttles of old, and you can see where money's been saved. Where once Shuttle PCs were carved almost entirely from aluminium, this one is cheapy steel, but with a reasonably nice finish. The front has a very shiny checker-board pattern that looks better in real life than it photographs. In reality it's more subtle and mirror-like than any of the pictures I've seen, including this one I just took.
It's a bit bigger than the older Shuttles, but just barely. . .a touch wider. Apparently it now accomodates a standard mini-ITX motherboard so it should be upgradable one day. Whether any other motherboard will have the right headers for the Shuttle case's connectors is another question.
COOLING
Also gone is Shuttle's "standard" ICE heatpipe cooler that would usually channel heat to a heatsink covering the single rear 92mm fan. There's a further issue that the CPU socket now sits underneath the power supply, so you can have anything too tall, and the northbridge heatsink means you can't have anything too wide either. There are a few heatsinks out there that will fit, but I couldn't find any still easily available. You can buy a version of the funky Shuttle ICE cooler, but it is specific to this J series chassis.
To be honest, I don't think it's a big deal. The motherboard comes with a warning of horrible suffering if you dare to use a CPU with more than 95W TDP, and in my case the standard stock Intel heatsink has done a fine job for that. I was lucky enough to have a copper-cored monstrosity that had come with a fire-breathing Pentium D cpu I once owned. Oh, and forget about overclocking - but we'll get to that later.
There is one benefit to using this kind of cooler. Older Shuttles relied on convection through the case to cool motherboard components, and suffered temperature build-up if you ran with the case lid off. The stock Intel fan does at least spread some air around regardless.
When I first looked at doing a build in this Shuttle I did consider a Pentium Dual-Core, because they're cheap and they overclock like little else I've experienced. In the end though I didn't fancy giving up on having a quad, and managed to get a bargain Q8400 on eBay for barely more than the price of a new dualie. It's idling at about 39C and peaking at about 55C under Prime, maybe 52C or so under quad-core gaming load (GTA4/Bad Company 2)
GRAPHICS CARDS
Dual-slot cards are now a reality - older Shuttle designs have put the PCIe x16 slot on the outside of the case, for reasons I've never managed to fathom. The other problem with graphics cards inside a Shuttle PC though is cooling them, and this hasn't changed a great deal. They've made the ventilation holes in the sides of the case lid larger this time around, but they're still not ideal, and they're in the wrong place - i.e. too low. I am seriously considering modifying that side of the case - either cutting a big panel out of the side and covering with some mesh, or just drilling a bunch of holes to allow some more air in.
With the case side off the GPU I'm using (Radeon 5770) hits 50C at full load, and with it on you get 65C - neither is a problem in the grand scheme of things, but if you wanted to run anything hotter it could be an issue. More than that, you can tell the thing isn't "breathing" right because as soon as you slide the lid on the GPU fan spins up faster at the sudden reduced air resistance, just the same as if you were to cover it with your hand.
I'm using a 5770 by PowerColor with an old-fashioned great-big-wide-heatsink kind of design. It's a single-slot design that takes two slots by virtue of its enormous cooler. The idea was to get the intake fan a bit further from the edge of the case, but in reality it's still too close for comfort. You may also notice an expertly crafted bit of ducting (a piece of white card) that's directing some of the air from the heatsink out of the back of the case through an uncovered PCI-slot. With the limited cooling this case has I think a rear-blowing graphics card is a good plan, and this little mod has dropped my CPU temperature while gaming by about 5C too as the heat buildup was that bad.
Another point to note, circled in blue on the picture above, is a little header that connects the power button on the front panel to the motherboard. I tried to mount my old Radeon 5850 in the case, but it wouldn't fit - not because it was too long, but because this header stopped the card from pushing down into the slot. Any big rectangular-box design graphics cards may fall foul of this. In the end the 5850 was never going to run reliably on the power supply anyway, so it wasn't a great loss.
SOUND
This board uses an apparently obscure sound chip made by IDT. Windows 7 has some built in drivers for this that work well - this is important, because the driver included on the CD that comes with the Shuttle has issues.
The driver and software that Shuttle Provide do give you some extra features - a program that sits in the taskbar and tells you when you've plugged headphones in, and presumably this allows reconfiguration of the 3 ports on the back to give you the promised 5.1 channel output. However, my experience of the bundled driver was that it ate 9% of my CPU at all times, for no apparent good reason.
Killing the process stopped useful things, like detection of when I'd plugged in my headphones. Rolling back to the Windows 7 default driver fixed this, and it still detects my headphones.
Quality-wise the on-board sound seems okay, but I've still not given it a proper comparison with my X-FI, particularly on how good the 3D-positional sound is. Thankfully I have a USB X-FI card - if I wanted to use a PCI one I'd be out of luck, as my only PCI slot is blocked by graphics card.
POWER SUPPLY
While we're on the subject, the power supply unit itself is a bit of an unknown quantity. There are myths about Shuttle PSUs being able to power all kinds of stuff that you wouldn't expect - and Shuttle's website does claim you can run both a 95W CPU and a 5850 on the standard power supply, but I don't buy that for a moment. The PSU here isn't one of Shuttle's own "SilentX" units either, but a unit made by ElanPower, whoever that is.
It's not terribly noisy, but not silent either. It only has 16A on the 12V line, but so far it's powering Q8400 and HD5770 without any issues. It never gets particularly hot even when pushed, and never gets very noisy either. I still plan to perhaps upgrade it at some point, but for now it's getting the job done. There isn't much else to say as power supply testing is a game for people with the right knowledge and equipment. Let's just say I'm not going to be running Prime and Furmark at the same time.
STORAGE
Hard disks:
The case uses the standard Shuttle design for holding drives - two 3.5" bays with a 5.25" bay above. In years gone by when hard disks were nuclear powered it was verging on suicidal to put a hard disk in both slots, but these days it's not so bad. I've got two Samsung EcoGreen F4's in there, which have the virtue of not really getting warm at all, even when packed in close together.
When using both 3.5" bays, the lower one is rather close to my CPU cooler, and I had to use a right-angle-connector SATA cable to get the cable to fit. This introduces one of the other fun little games you often find when building small form-factor machines - there quickly evolves a "correct order" in which you have to assemble all the parts so that things don't get in each others' way.
Optical Drive:
The DVD drive sits on top - now, LanOC made small mention of it being awkward to mount properly, but they didn't do the issue justice. Essentially, the button on the front panel to open the DVD drive is not actually in front of the drive itself. A long plastic arm transfers your button-push to the drive's open/close button. My experience is, even when as perfectly fitted as possible, the button seems flimsy and doesn't feel right, but does "work". However, I've found it just as easy to gently press on the front of the case where I know the DVD drive's open/close button is. Also "amusing" is that until I got placement of the drive just right the tray would open and close at the slightest touch, bump of the table, or worse, sometimes just randomly. Haunted DVD drives are annoying.
SSD
One of the fun parts of any PC build featuring a 2.5" Solid State Drive is figuring out where to attach it. In a normal PC case you might use adapters, or velcro, or duct-tape, but the Shuttle is short on space. I originally planned to mount it underneath the 3.5" bays, somehow attached to the bottom (probably with velcro), but in the end I wanted to route SATA cables down here and with the other motherboard headers and cables below there wasn't really the space.
Fortunately Shuttle's engineers have accidently provided a perfect mounting location - at least, I don't think it was by design. The plastic front panel of the case is held on by 4 lugs that are easily unfastened, and there's a nice gap behind it.
Those pointless ventilation holes in the front panel (pointless since the plastic panel is solid, leaving no way for air to get in) finally come in useful, with a single screw fastening into the bottom of the SSD holding the drive steady. The SATA power and data cables add a little tension to the other end, and suddenly everything is secure. The front panel pops back on and we're done. It's almost as if it were designed for it - if they'd just add a few properly spaced screw-holes on this front panel it'd be a marketable feature.
CHIPSET & BIOS
Finally, a few words about the Chipset and BIOS on this board. It uses a G41 chipset which is a bargain-basement solution. It's well reported that this chipset tops out at about 340MHz Frontside Bus, and a quick check confirmed this - 340 seems stable, 342 will not POST. This means that if you have a 1333MHz FSB processor, you're not going to be overclocking it.
BIOS options are not great for overclocking either. The major issue I have is that there is NO control for the CPU multiplier, not up OR down, you're stuck with the default. That would seriously limit your options when overclocking a Pentium Dual-Core for instance as you're basically left with only the FSB to tweak. However, with DDR3 rather than DDR2 perhaps it wouldn't be so much of an issue, as keeping the memory in-spec shouldn't be so difficult when it can run at 1600MHz or so if needs be.
The southbridge on this board is a relatively old ICH7. It has no RAID and no AHCI support, so my SSD is stuck at a Windows Experience Index rating of 6.9 - oh noes! It doesn't make a great deal of real-world difference as far as I can tell though.
CONCLUSIONS
I like this box. My main gaming rig is now the size of a shoebox and it still runs everything, even with a lowly spec of a Q8400 at stock speed and a Radeon 5770. And by everything it means I'm still playing GTA4 quite happily, and Crysis Warhead ran smoothly, albeit at "Gamer" settings rather than "Enthusiast". I'm honestly not missing my Radeon 5850 and I was rather surprised when I arrived at that conclusion.
Everything works well and is stable. There are some nightmare reviews of this Shuttle on NewEgg, with people complaining of apparently Dead-on-Arrival PCs and memory incompatibility problems, sometimes fixed with a bios update (there is such an update on Shuttle's website that claims memory compatibility fixes.) Thankfully I had no such issues - perhaps (hopefully) new stock has the latest bios already flashed.
I have some longer-term concerns about how long the PSU is going to last, as I think my demands on it when gaming are going to be somewhere around the 90% load mark. Better quality units are available fairly easily so I'm likely to look into it at some point, particularly as that will let me upgrade GPU to something a bit better. Hoping the Q8400 should stay usable for a while yet with the right graphics card - which also means taking care to get one that will definitely fit.
In value terms I still rate this Shuttle as excellent. Trading down (mostly in size, not all that much in performance) hasn't cost me anything once I've got all my old components eBayed away. Big LAN party is only a few weeks away, and when this box needs to retire it will make a kick-ass media centre.
This has been a <TL : DR> production. Today's episode was brought to you by the letters X, P, C and the number 775. . . . blah blah Children's Television Workshop.
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