Custom PC: Premium Grade Award
 "Put simply, the SP35P2 offers the most flexibility and potential performance from any bare bones Shuttle system we've seen to date," sum up the editors having had a closer look at the Shuttle XPC Barebone SP35P2 Pro. This latest performance box from Shuttle which truely "has the most thrust yet" convinced the editors in terms of performance, flexibility and heat dissipation and won the coveted "Premium Grade" award of Custom PC with an overall score of 87 per cent.
The latest member to join "Shuttles range of neat and tidy portable PCs" is the Shuttle XPC Barebone SP35P2 Pro. Apart from the "great design," the powerhouse incorporates Intel's P35 Express chipset ensuring "great peformance" and other "treats for performance-hungry enthusiasts. "Taking off the case reveals a board ready to take high-end components suchlike Intel's "quad-core Extreme CPUs" and up to 8GB of DDR2 memory. Moreover, there is even room for up to three SATA hard disks and a powerful GeForce 8800 graphics cards. Shuttle's "impressive design" of a cooling solution is here to avoid overheating and consists of "a complex combination of small fans and well-placed vents." The Shuttle XPC Barebone SP35P2 Pro is powered by 400W which deals with high-end gear and "provides enough oomph to support a GeForce 8800 and a quad-core Intel CPU," according to Custom PC.
Internal musings are tidy and make system "easy to build," since wiring inside is "pre-fitted and logically laid out." That said, "all the drive bays are easily removable so the building process isn't as fiddly as you'd expect," the editors state. Being a model of the Pro series, the SP35P2 Pro boasts "a biometric fingerprint scanner" and USB speed link technology which is "another neat feature." Performance-wise, the Shuttle XPC Barebone SP35P2 Pro basically delivered "high benchmark scores" and "similar stock performance" as the standard motherboard test kit and even was "quite on a par" with it.
Performance gains from overclocking the Shuttle "were very impressive," too and "the small aluminium cooler did remarkably well to keep the temperature of the dual core CPU at a high, but stable, 70°C," attest the editors. Just as proven by the overclocking tests, "the SP35P2's case is very efficient at dissipating heat."
Pros:
- Room for a very powerful PC with a GeForce 8800 graphics card
- Great design
- Easy to build
Scores:
Speed: 89%
Features: 85%
Value:88 %
Overall: 87% |