Shuttle Prima SP45H7 Intel Barebones System Review

The BIOS
Before we get into testing the system let’s check out the BIOS. This Shuttle uses the ever popular Phoenix AwardBIOS. The first thing you are going to want to do is go into the Advanced BIOS features. Here you can set your hard disk boot priority and set the boot device order. Also you will see a CPU feature section. If you plan on doing any overclocking you are going to want to set the C1E Function to disable.

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

The Integrated Peripherals has what you would expect, settings for the SATA, Onboard devices, and the USB settings. You can also go into the PC Health status and check your CPU temperature. One thing to note here you can change the fan control mode from PWM to manual if you want to. Then you can crank it up all the way.

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

The Frequency / Voltage control is where you will find all of the CPU and memory settings. You can choose a 6x or 8x multiplier and the FSB starts at 266 and can go all the way up to 600. As far as memory settings it is all there. One interesting thing is that you can dynamically overclock the CPU. The CPU DOC Set can go all the way up to 20%. So you can overclock the CPU without even knowing how!

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

Temperatures & Overclocking
As I said the cooler on this Shuttle system is much like the one from 5 years ago, so it must be good or they would have changed it. Using Core Temp and Prime95 we tested the CPU cooler and were quite impressed. At idle the temperature is right around 38 degrees. When we put the load on the system the temperature jumped up to 54 degrees. Now that is a 16 degree difference, but considering how small the cooler is and that it is in such a small case that is pretty impressive.

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

I also did some simple overclocking on the E6400. It was very easy to do as well, just go into the BIOS, into the Frequency / Voltage section. Then turn the spread spectrum off and start bumping up the FSB. My max stable overclock was 951.9MHz over the stock speed of the E6400, bringing it up to 3.08Ghz. If I would have tweaked the settings even more I could have got an even better overclock. While the system was overclocked the temperature was still nice and low at 40 degrees.

Shuttle Prima SP45H7 Intel Barebones System

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