Shuttle XPC Z77 Barebones Mini PC Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,406 words · ~7 min read
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welcome to my unboxing of another shuttle xpc barebones PC I love these
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things as you guys have probably figured out by now I think they're a fantastic
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idea and a great way to build a small form factor PC in the most simple
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possible way and it's not just a great way to build a small form Factory PC
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it's a great way to build a PC in general if you're Enthusiast who wants
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to build their own PC but you're an Enthusiast who doesn't have the
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knowledge necessarily to do some of the
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more complicated parts of System Assembly like installing the motherboard
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connecting the front panel headers um connecting the power supply correctly to
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the motherboard all of this kind of stuff there we go so the shuttle xpc
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barebones kits actually make all of that stuff simpler while leaving the main
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configuration parts of the system system so that is the CPU memory the drive the
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graphics card you want to use totally up to you and for you to install and then
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they also include a colored quick start guide to
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help you get started so here is the the general basic shuttle chassis that
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they're using these days it has a 5 and 1/4 inch Bay which is uh with a matter
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of a couple minutes you can get it hooked up to the front uh button on your
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optical drive you've got a 3 and 1/2 in front dri front Bay you can use for like
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a card reader or something like that power switch hard drive indicator LED as
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well as your front panel head ports so you have two USB 3 two usb2 headphone
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and microphone ports all built into the front with a nice Sleek brushed aluminum
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finish the top is also brushed aluminum the sides are also brushed aluminum and
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they look can you see the brushed yeah there you go and you got ventilation
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holes all along the sides because that is the only place where you're going to
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have air being intak in order to be oh is he trying to look at those sorry guys
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and then it will be exhausted by the 92mm fan at the back as well as the 40
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mm fan built into the power supply there's your power connector here are
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your onboard display outs so there's DVI which supports VGA via an adapter you
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can tell cuz it's a dvii and then HDMI
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we've got uh USB two times four times as
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well as one e SATA USB 3 that's running
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off the Intel chipset so that's going to be nice high-speed USB 3 gigabit
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Ethernet as well as 5.1 audio out did I
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say 5.1 that looks like 7.1 sorry guys all right let's open this up and see
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what shuttle has done on the inside in terms of configuration for this system
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you can see it's only three screws to get it opened up thumb screws of course
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shuttle does want to make this as simple as they can because they are designed
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for novice Builders and experienced Builders alike
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on the inside it's pretty straightforward again all we need is a screwdriver here to take out all the
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drive base so you can see there's our 5 and 1/4 in as well as our two 3 and 1/2
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in drive base so if you do install an
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external 3 and 1/2 in device like I showed you before you will sacrifice one
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of your potential internal 3 and 1/2
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in mounting Bays hold on there we go got
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it so there you go just an aluminum piece right there fairly straightforward
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once you get it bolted in at the top it loses a lot of that Flex so it's going to be perfectly sturdy for installing
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your drives here inside you see they've already done most of the complicated
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connections for you so things like the front panel USB 3 the front panel uh
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connectors like your power switch your reset switch your or there is no reset
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switch pardon me but your uh front LEDs and whatnot you've also got uh what else
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is plugged in your CPU fan is already plugged in although you'll probably have to take that off in order to install the
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CPU so to install the CPU is quite simple all you have to do is take out
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these four thumb screws pull out the custom Heat pipe cooler that shuttle
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uses to cool their xpcs so you got three heat pipes going up here to the 92mm fan
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that does most of the exhaust for the system so due to the fact that they use
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a uh a single fan here and then one small fan in the power supply shuttles
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are actually quite quiet even compared to compared to something like a
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performance desktop in spite of the fact that you can still put a lot of
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performance inside a shuttle so in terms of SATA uh upgrade options we've got 1 2
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3 four SATA ports two of them are SATA 3 6 GB per second so fully ready for the
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latest high performance ssds and two of them are SATA 3 uh SATA 2 3 gbit per
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second now speaking of high performance ssds you can install an MSA SSD if you
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want to use it here for Intel SRT caching to go along with your boot drive
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or any other Drive in your system and then you can also install a mini PCIe
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card so they've got support for both of those built right into this very small
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form factor motherboard now in terms of
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expansion slots we've got a PCIe 16x as well as a PCIe 4X so you can install up
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to a dual slot high performance graphics card and we've actually been able to fit
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a Radeon hd7970 into one of these shuttles with
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no issues in fact so we never actually ran the card last time but we should
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totally do that with the z77 board we should throw a compatible Intel
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processor inside here quad core and then we'll throw 7970 and and see how it
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fares actually here is the vrm
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cooling and here is one of the things
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about this machine that is most unique and most special this is a 500 wat 80
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plus bronze power supply in this form
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factor look at how small this thing is oh I'm going to do it I'm going to do it
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wait for it wait for it taking it out of my battery case oh yeah this thing is so
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small that the only suitable comparison is the iPhone comparison that is how big
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it is there you
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go wow three three rails on on the 12vt
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uh 12vt rail neat okay I think that
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pretty much covers the general unboxing and overview thank you for checking out
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this video and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech tips for unboxings reviews
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and other computer videos sorry guys I was just firing this up for the uh for
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the test that I want to do here and I realized I totally didn't show you guys
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some of the internals here so we've got a front uh floppy connector we've got
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two uh Molex 4 pin perip connectors we
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have four SATA power connectors and
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finally we have a 6 plus2 and a six pin
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connector so we have full support for high performance graphics cards another
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thing that I totally forgot to show you guys is the fact that it includes a
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power cord it includes didn't even go
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through the accessories two SATA cables a slot cover all the mounting screws you
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need as well as a couple cable ties thermal compound as well as never
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actually remembering which I intended to do although I didn't promise you guys
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I'd do it never actually remembering to take out the color installation guide
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which oh look at that they included in a bunch of different languages
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too which shows you how to do
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things in
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color that is all