At first we would like to thank Shuttle Europe for offering a sample of their latest DS57U Barebone for testing and reviewing.

 

 

 

About Shuttle:

 

"Shuttle Inc, founded in Taiwan in 1983, is specialised in development and production of innovative mini PCs. The joint-stock company is represented worldwide by a network of branch offices in Germany, the US and Japan. Since 2001 the attractive cube-shaped PCs have conquered nearly any field of application and have become the core business of the company headquartered in Taipei / Taiwan. Widely acclaimed by customers and press across the globe, Shuttle founds its success on effective management and long-term experience in making mainboards of highest quality standards. Since years Shuttle's mini PC barebones and fully-configured systems are the first choice of many system integrators, VARs, OEMs and ODMs banking on the high reliability and build quality. With appealing mini PC solutions Shuttle meets the requirements of consumers excellently and seeks to provide further user-friendly solutions of consumer electronics for the digital home environment."

 

Main Product Features:

 

Product Specifications:

We have recently received in our test labs one of the latest machines from Shuttle, which integrates in their Slim-PC category, the 1.3L DS57U barebone, which has at its center the Intel Broadwell ULV Celeron 3205U 1.5GHz dual-core processor; the product is shipped inside a medium-sized cardboard box, which has a very simple box art:

 

 

 

On one of the box sides, we will be welcomed by an attached sticker, which tells us the main hardware characteristics of the product along with a small warning which informs the buyer that the barebone only supports DDR3L 1.35V SODIMM memory modules:

 

 

 

The box is provided by a handle for easy manipulation:

 

 

 

The product along with its bundle are held inside with lots of protective foam material:

 

 

 

Besides the bundle, we will also receive the installation manuals, in different languages, which are held separately inside a transparent plastic bag:

 

 

 

After describing the barebone and board interfaces, the manufacturer is explaining step-by-step the installation process:

 

 

 

We get an additional leaflet regarding the VESA mounts:

 

 

 

The Shuttle Slim PC is not called slim for nothing: its dimensions are 20cm x 16.5cm x 3.95cm (LWH) and also has the necessary mounting pieces for VESA mounting as a free accessory:

 

 

 

The frontal area of the unit comes with no less than 4 USB 2.0 ports, the Power and HDD activity LEDs, the Power button, two COM ports but also one SD Card reader:

 

 

 

On the back we will get to see contacts for an external power or CMOS button or 5V DV voltage supply, one DisplayPort port, one HDMI port, a microphone and headphone jack, two USB 3.0 ports, two RJ45 Gigabit LAN ports and one DC-IN port:

 

 

 

On one of the device laterals, we have ventilation holes available:

 

 

 

Here we will be also able to spot a Kensington lock port:

 

 

 

Same thing we can say about the opposite side, with an additional Kensington lock port:

 

 

 

The area with the Shuttle logo in the middle acts as a large heatsink for the soldered Intel Celeron 3205U CPU:

 

 

 

Further down we will get to see a sticker which shows some more details regarding the product:

 

 

 

The opposite side comes with two removable metallic covers:

 

 

 

Here we will have to install the necessary extra components in order to make the PC fully-functional:

 

 

 

One of the slots can house either one mini-PCIe card or mSATA; the slot functionality can be switched from the BIOS:

 

 

 

Two memory slots are available on the motherboard; here we will find the warning again that we should only use 1.35V SODIMM DDR3L memory and not with higher 1.5V voltage for a maximum of 16GB of RAM:

 

 

 

The separate compartment holds the pre-installed Wi-Fi card along with the HDD/SSD place holder:

 

 

 

A W704E1-A1 WLAN B/G/N card is preinstalled inside the slot:

 

 

 

The 1.35V memory module can be installed in just a snap:

 

 

 

For installing the storage drive, we first have to remove the small metallic holder, which is held with only one screw to the case:

 

 

 

This one will be attached to the drive with two other screws:

 

 

 

And then put back into the case;

 

 

 

Let’s come back a bit to the accessory box:

 

 

 

Here we will get two case feet, necessary mounting screws, the power lead, VESA mounts, the power adapter but also the installation disk:

 

 

 

The VESA mounts can be used for mounting the PC behind our office monitor, if the design permits this type of mounting:

 

 

 

The power supply was designed by Asian Power Devices and is rated on the output as 19V, 3.42A:

 

 

 

The supplied case feet have pre-drilled holes into them and on their bottom we will get to see the rubber components:

 

 

 

 

The feet take two screws each to install:

 

 

 

Here is how the device looks after the installation has been completed; since this is a fanless system, we will always recommend to sit it on a flat surface in order to permit optimal ventilation:

 

 

 

The DS57U barebone comes with a regular Aptio Setup Utility, which means no nice UEFI interface for us. The main menus are present on the top side of the GUI and here we will find Main, Advanced, Security, Boot and Exit. Inside the Main menu, we get to see the currently installed BIOS version, running CPU, total installed system memory and from here we can also adjust the date and time:

 

 

 

From the Advanced menu we will be able to spot the CPU Configuration, SATA Configuration, USB Configuration, OnBoard Device Configuration, Power Management Configuration and Hardware Health Configuration sub-sections:

 

 

 

The CPU Configuration area lets us know all installed CPU characteristics and here we will be also able to enable or disable some related settings:

 

 

 

 

As expected, the SATA Configuration menu allows us to see which hardware is connected to the ports and we can also enable or disable the Hot Plug feature:

 

 

 

The USB 3.0 controller can be disabled at will from the next menu:

 

 

 

The OnBoard Device Configuration sub-section lets us enable or disable the audio, LAN, Serial port interfaces, but we can also choose the functionality of the extra mini-PCIe/mSATA port, select allocated video memory or enable Intel VT-d:

 

 

 

The power management menus are available from the next area:

 

 

 

The Hardware Health Configuration only displays the current CPU temperature, along with the system voltages:

 

 

 

From the Security menu, we will be able to change user/supervisor passwords but also enable flash write protection:

 

 

 

The Boot menu allows us to enable USB boot, change the boot mode but also work with drive priorities:

 

 

 

Finally, we have the Exit menu where we can choose to save, discard or load factory defaults:

 

 

 

First hardware monitoring program we have fired up is CPU-Z, with its multiple information tabs:

 

CPU

 

 

Caches

 

 

Mainboard

 

 

Memory

 

 

SPD

 

 

GPU-Z will give us a summary on the integrated GPU:

 

 

 

We have also fired up the latest AIDA64 for finding out more details regarding the internal components:

 

CPU

 

 

 

Motherboard

 

 

 

CPU IMC

 

 

 

 

Integrated Graphics

 

 

 

 

 

3DMark 2001

 

3DMark 2003

 

3DMark 2005

 

3DMark 2006

 

PCMark 2005

 

PCMark 7

 

CrystalMark

 

SuperPI 1.5 XS 1M

 

CineBench R10

 

CineBench R11.5

 

x264 Encoding

 

Counterstrike Source

 

 

Shuttle has built the DS57U inside a proven chassis, which takes quite little space and succeeds to cool the internal components without the need of extra fans; one of the case laterals is acting like a huge heatsink and in this case it only remains warm even when the system is stressed to the max. Besides the Intel Celeron 3205U, we will also find models on the same platform with the Intel i3-5005U CPU (DS57U3), the Intel i5-5200U CPU (DS57U5) or the Intel i7-5500U CPU (DS57U7).

 

Our review sample seems to pack quite a punch, despite the fact that it only has two cores based on Broadwell. The new architecture is very efficient and we have got decent performances on both arithmetic and 3D side, so we won’t hesitate to recommend it for light productivity purposes, playing old games, browsing or running multimedia content.

 

As we have mentioned before, the temperatures are very acceptable during high loads, even when the ambient is a little bit higher during summer time.

 

 

 

The power consumption is also very little since we have measured a total of 21.90W while in IDLE and 43.60W while in Full-Load with one mSATA 128GB installed along with 4GB of RAM and an additional 500GB 2.5'' 7200RPM HDD.

 

Be careful though when purchasing the SODIMM memory for this unit, since it is only compatible with 1.35V sticks. Plenty of storage can be installed inside the unit too, without counting the external storage we could connect via the available USB ports: we can install a roomy mSATA SSD to boot the OS from and also a high-capacity 2.5’’ drive in the suitable bay for storage purposes.

 

The device can be well installed behind the office monitor thanks to the VESA mounts, but it also takes very little space on the table if we decide to use the included feet in order to mount it vertically. Also, it is designed to operate 24/7, which makes it suitable for industrial use too.

 

As negative points we would remind that we would have preferred that all ports would be USB 3.0 and a more modern interface for the UEFI BIOS could have been in order for 2015

 

The Shuttle DS57U barebone is available online at the moment of the review for about 197 Euros.

 

Shuttle DS57U Barebone is Recommended For:

 

 

 

We would like to thank again to Shuttle Europe for making this review possible!