With the SZ170R8, Shuttle has eliminated some of the compatibility with somewhat unused hardware nowadays like optical drives and made some serious space for installing no less than four 3.5’’ drives inside the 14.2 litre chassis. A fan was also added in front in order to cool these but also for facilitating a more fluent airflow from the front to the back of the case; the case does support installation of up to 64GB of RAM (DDR4, 2133MHz), a dual-slot video card (which can be powered by one 6-pin and one 8-pin PSU connector), a M.2 SSD, an optional Wireless LAN card, a COM-port for special applications but also 2.5’’ drives with an extra adapter.

This time the manufacturer has included a beefy 500W power supply in order for the XPC Cube to handle even higher-specced video cards and as it could have been seen from the testing stage, we could obtain a healthy overclock without the need of raising the stock voltage.

As a negative point, we could remind the same we did say with the SH170R6: the video cards which evacuate the hot air inside the case won’t work too well because of the limited space between the heatsink and the top cover. It is another story if we do have a VGA card which can evacuate the heat at the back of the case because cold air will be always sucked in from the perforated lateral.

The recommended price for this barebone is 322 Euros excluding VAT, which makes it an ideal purchase when considering building a home-made NAS, a multimedia machine or a multimedia and gaming machine combined.

Shuttle XPC Cube Barebone SZ170R8 is Recommended for:

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