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Shuttle brings ultra-powerful small-form-factor PC out to play

by Tarinder Sandhu on 18 June 2010, 16:23

Tags: Shuttle

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12-thread monster with HD 5870 in situ

Fancy a high-end PC but don't have the room to house a mid-tower chassis? Shuttle may just have the answer with the XPC J3 5800G.

Built around the Intel X58 chipset, Shuttle's SX58J3 barebones chassis, not much larger than a shoebox, serves as a base for the dinky yet powerful system. The box of tricks ships with a proprietary motherboard that features a '3+1' DDR3 memory arrangement (triple-channel, unless all four DIMMs are populated, where it reverts to dual channel), eSATA, eight USB ports, high-definition audio, dual Gigabit LAN and an 80PLUS Bronze-certified 500W PSU that's stout enough to power a GeForce GTX 480 card and other tasty kit.

An online configurator prices up a basic Shuttle-built 5800G for $1,899, which gets you a Core i7 920 chip, 4GB DDR3 memory, 500GB hard-drive, DVD-ReWriter and GeForce 9500 GT video card.

But going to town on the configurator brings truly high-end kit into play. How about the J3 5800G equipped with a Core i7 980X six-core CPU, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, and a GeForce GTX 480 GPU? A veritable snip at $4,800.

We know that the SX58J3 can underpin a capable system because we've been running one in the labs for a week now, equipped with the 980X CPU, 6GB of Corsair DDR3 RAM, and Radeon HD 5870 card.

Outfitted with a Radeon HD 5850

Throwing a Radeon HD 5870 into the mix. It fits, just

Not so big, is it?

Stay tuned for the full review next week.



HEXUS Forums :: 6 Comments

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Looks good seems the psu is getting more amd more powerful with each revision.

Any idea if the psu is backwards compatible with older models?
Bit of a beast.

Is Shuttle cutting down on manufacturing cost, as its high-end Shuttle you expect it to be made of aluminium and not steel. I wonder if the reduced cost benefits the end consumer? Probably not.
The RAM on that is going to get very toasty. Bank closest to fan might be ok but second bank looks short of airflow.

Could do better with Silverstone SG05 and more care with the cable routing
There is also other signs of cost cutting too when compared to the SX58H7:

http://forums.hexus.net/small-form-factor-portables/186884-quality-shuttle-sff-barebone-systems-going-downhill.html

Ebuyer are selling the SX58J3 for around Ā£440:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/222817

This is around the same price as the SX58H7.
Thats gotta get pretty hot surely?