Shuttle has refreshed its XPC Barebone series, but this time with the Z87 chipset for supporting the latest LGA1150 Haswell processors, while keeping quite a small footprint. The chassis layout is sleek and should fit perfectly in our living room or in our work place and has enough connectivity options in both front and back. The unit supports installation of an optical drive, but also two 3.5’’ HDDs with RAID support (2.5’’ drives can be installed too but the user needs to purchase additional adapters).

The power supply included with the system is a 500W, 80PLUS Bronze compliant and allows installation of a high-end video card; we only need to mention that we must be attentive at the clearance and for that we should inspect the compatibility list Shuttle does offer.

The air-cooler has a proprietary design which could be seen at many other models of theirs; it is called Shuttle I.C.E. (integrated cooling engine) with 4 heatpipes, which mounts on the CPU with push-pins. The temperature is regulated by the included 92mm PWM fan, which is easy to remove from the case for cleaning purposes. The maximum TDP supported is announced by Shuttle as being 95W and our retail 4670K CPU did hold well when we have stressed the system with Prime95.

The SZ87R6 should support overclocking of the CPU, we have the option available inside the BIOS (but without the ability to set the CPU voltage), but after modifying the multiplier, the processor did not raise its frequency over stock. We think that this is mainly because of early BIOS versions and would be fixed shortly in the future.

The motherboard is also equipped with 4 memory slots for a maximum of 32GB, two Mini PCI-Express slots but also Dual Gigabit LAN with teaming support.

The SZ87R6 model has a recommended price of 356 Euros.

Shuttle XPC Barebone SZ87R6 is Recommended For:

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