Verdict: The latest Shuttle has the most thrust yet.
Shuttle's range of neat and tidy portable PCs may not be able to compete with NASA's iconic orbital spacecraft, but then the Space Shuttle Atlantis does have two solid rocket boosters, each containing over five hundred tonnes of propellant, while the Shuttle XPC SP35P2 has no means of propulsion. A fairer comparison is that of a tower-sized desktop gaming PC, against which tiny Shuttle PCs have fared reasonably well. This is the latest David to take on a Goliath desktop PC, and with the ability to house a GeForce 8800 and a quad-core CPU, we couldn't wait to find out if this could sling a stone as accurately as the Biblical figure.
We criticised the last Shuttle system we reviewed, the XPC DS39P2 though, for being built around the top-of-the-range and not very good Intel 975 chipset, rather than opting for the cheaper and more popular Intel 965 chipset. Thankfully, Shuttle has made a better choice of chipset this time around. Instead of the current top-end Intel X38, the company has used a P35, which is teamed with DDR2 memory rather than super-expensive DDR3. And just as motherboard manufacturers have made the chipset very overclocker-friendly with great BIOSes, there are treats for performance-hungry enthusiasts in this Shuttle too. However, let's first look at what kind of system you could build in this black box.
As you'd expect when squeezing an entire PC into a shoebox - albeit a larger than normal shoebox - there's a list of compromises. You can forget about two graphics cards, as the motherboard only has room for a single PCI-E slot. This is placed on the outer edge of the board, but will orientate your graphics card in such a way that its cooler will be facing inwards. This means that a dual-height graphics cooler will obscure the PCI slot but there's enough integrated into the motherboard that only the lack of a dedicated sound card should cause you any worry.
Elsewhere inside, the P35P2 Pro is very impressive. There are four DIMM slots, capable of supporting up to 16GB of RAM, although 4GB DDR2 DIMMs are as prevalent as the monsters portrayed in Ray Harryhausen films. With the LGA775 socket (and P35 chipset) capable of taking the latest quad-core Extreme Edition, the P35P2 can accommodate a lot of fast, hot-running kit.
These high-end components are cooled by a complex combination of small fans and well-placed vents. The impressive design of the SP35P2's cooling is reassuring, and if you include the 3.5in external floppy disk cage, you could install up to three S-ATA hard disks in the Shuttle.
One word of warning is the claim that you can fit a full-sized graphics card in the case. You can use a GeForce 8800, but it had better be a GTS card; the Ultra, with the bulging fan of the reference cooler, won't fit, and although a GTX will physically fit, there's only one PCI-E 6-pin connector and you'll have to perform some Molex doubling-up tomfoolery to get a Molex-to-PCI-E adaptor (and its two Molex connectors) to work. Even if you manage to do this, the length of the PCB will effectively block off the main intake vent on the right side panel, thereby increasing the temperature of the components inside. This is before you consider how much extra heat a hot graphics card would introduce. An ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT has the same length of PCB as the GTX, so it will incur the same cooling problems.
As ever with Shuttle systems, the wiring inside the SP35P2 is pre-fitted and logically laid out, so refreshingly, the fiddly work of plugging in cables has already been done for you.
The optical and floppy drive bays, as well as the S-ATA hard disk cages, are easily removable, so the building process isn't as fiddly as you'd expect. If you forget to plug in your floppy disk drive, however, you'll have to uninstall almost every component in sequence to reach it, so check the connection before proceeding.
Performance
The mini-motherboard inside the Shuttle is based around the same Intel P35 chipset found in the tremendous Asus Blitz Formula Special Edition motherboard. With this in mind, and since all the other components inside the Shuttle (except the PSU) were from our standard motherboard test kit, we expected to see similar stock performance.
The Shuttle delivered just that in our image and video editing tests. Its scores of 971 and 995 respectively are comparable to, if not quite on a par with, the 1,000 and 994 scores of the full-sized £162 Asus board. However, our multitasking test tripped up the Shuttle, resulting in a relatively disappointing score of 770. Other P35-based motherboards have suffered similar drops in our multitasking test, so this result is forgivable.
Of course, the use of full-sized desktop components is the key selling point of small systems over laptops such as the Rock Xtreme 770, and the best aspect of desktop components is their ability to be overclocked. Accordingly, the SP35P2's BIOS offers limited control over CPU frequency and voltage; increasing the voltage going into our Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 test CPU from 1.3V to 1.525V allowed us to overclock its clock frequency from 2.66GHz to 3.66GHz. This is the same overclock as that of the overclocker-specific Asus Blitz Formula.
If you've ever overclocked a Shuttle, you'll know that the automatically adjusted fans can make quite a racket at full speed. Predictably, in order to deal with the massive amounts of extra heat from our overvolted CPU, the SP35P2 became a little noisy. That said, the small aluminium cooler did remarkably well to keep the temperature of our dual-core CPU at a high, but stable, 70ûC.
The performance gains were very impressive, with the image editing score rocketing to 1,355, while the video encoding result increased to 1,341(both scores are one point quicker than the Blitz Formula). Even the multitasking test improved considerably to 1,021 - only 70 points slower than the Asus Blitz Formula, a smaller difference than at stock speeds.
The Shuttle returned an overall score of 1,239 when overclocked, and while we'd advise not pushing the system quite that far for everyday use (the resultant heat and noise was a little too much for our liking), it shows that the SP35P2's case is very efficient at disposing of heat. It also shows that any system built in this bare bones is capable of getting the same from your hardware as any full-sized tower case.
Conclusion
Small form factor PCs don't grab the headlines as much as gaming laptops, but it's difficult to see why this is the case. While SFF PCs such as the SP35P2 don't offer the effortless portability of their foldable laptop cousins, they more than make for this with their ability to house full-sized, no-compromise CPUs, graphics cards and hard disks. The high benchmark scores, and the ability to overclock to obtain more performance, attest to this fact.
Put simply, the SP35P2 offers the most flexibility and potential performance from any bare bones Shuttle system we've seen to date. As components become more power-hungry, it's debatable for how long you'll be able to continually upgrade the SP35P2, considering that the 400W PSU inside the Shuttle is the same model as found inside the previous generation of Shuttle kit.
That said, however, the SP35P2 is capable of taming daunting amounts of 2D and 3D processing power (and heat) in the name of space-saving. It costs about the same as any decent small bare bones and, given that it avoids most of the usual pitfalls, this is easily the best small form factor PC we've seen.
