Shuttle Prima SP45H7 Intel Barebones System Review

Overview Continued
Once we have the casing off the system we can take a look inside. The motherboard fits perfectly inside the cube case. As I said there is room for 2 add-on cards, you have 1 PCI-Express x16 slot and 1 PCI slot. So no SLI or Crossfire here, but you could add in a video card and sound card if you like. Also another thing that caught my attention was the 3 USB headers, this means you easily connect more internal USB devices like a sound card, or if you are not using the PCI slot you can install a USB bracket to add more USB ports. One really convenient thing is that Shuttle has already connected your 2 SATA cables and IDE cable and run them to where they would be connected to your drives. This helps overall with cable management and just saves you time.

Shuttle Prima SP45H7 Intel Barebones System Shuttle Prima SP45H7 Intel Barebones System

On the other side of the case we find the power supply. Shuttle uses their 80 PLUS certified 300W power supply. This power supply is nice and small but still provides enough power for all of your devices. Besides the main power and ATX power connectors you get 3 SATA connectors, 2 molex connectors, a floppy connector, and a 6pin PCI-E connector. The covers everything that will fit in this system in any configuration! One lead off the power supply has a molex and SATA power connector on it so if you are just going to have a single SATA hard drive and a non-SATA optical drive all you need is that 1 cable.

Shuttle Prima SP45H7 Intel Barebones System Shuttle Prima SP45H7 Intel Barebones System

The drive housing can fit 2 hard drives and a single optical drive. It can easily be removed by taking out a single screw on each side. Once it is removed you are able to access the rest of the power connectors and drive connectors. Notice there is an extra SATA connection so if you are using 2 hard drives and a SATA CD-ROM you will be ok. Shuttle does provide another SATA cable as well. The northbridge is covered by a large heatsink with a fan on top that will provide great cooling.

Shuttle Prima SP45H7 Intel Barebones System Shuttle Prima SP45H7 Intel Barebones System

The CPU cooling system is quite unique. It uses a single CPU block on top of the CPU then has 4 heatpipes to transfer the heat to a mounted heatsink on the back of the case. The heat is then dispersed with an 80mm fan. This has actually been Shuttle’s cooling system for a while now, if you look back at out Building a Shuttle System article from 2003 they used the same type of system. Don’t change things when they work well, right?

Shuttle Prima SP45H7 Intel Barebones System Shuttle Prima SP45H7 Intel Barebones System

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