Ballistics Report

Pros

Performance: The Shuttle SN27P was able to keep up with the premium nForce 500 ATX motherboards. Although it didn’t win any benchmarks, it stayed with the pack throughout the tests.

Noise: All fans in the Shuttle were quiet, making a low whisper at 2 feet and inaudible at 10 feet. In addition to that, the 7900GTX used for testing has a quiet and large fan to further reduce noise.

Overclocking: The Shuttle SN27P2 is the best Shuttle yet for overclocking. We were able to achieve the max FSB of 300, which is high for any motherboard, and even better for a SFF. There is little space for cooling, so you must remember to be careful when overclocking.

Cons

Absence of Legacy Connectors: For the first time in a Shuttle SFF, the serial, parallel, and PS/2 connectors have been removed. This is a feature that could have easily been included, as there was plenty of room on the back of the SN27P2’s chassis. Clearly Shuttle’s trying to move the industry one step forward, similar to ABIT’s legacy-free first generation MAX motherboards a few years back. Back then the move was too soon and ABIT quickly reversed itself, including serial, parallel, and PS/2 ports on their follow-up MAX motherboards. Iit will be interesting to see if the market is finally ready to go legacy free once again.

Connectivity: While NVIDIA’s nForce 570 Ultra chipset supports dual GigE Ethernet networking, Shuttle has elected to only include one GigE port on the back of the SN27P2. nForce 570 Ultra also lacks support for integrated graphics, so you’ll need a dedicated PCI Express graphics card to run video. These probably aren’t major issues for many of you, but something to keep in mind nonetheless.
Price and upgradeability: Street prices for the SN27P2 start just above $350, which is in line with previous flagship SFF offerings from Shuttle, but probably a little higher than what you’d pay if you were to build an nForce 570 Ultra system with more conventional desktop parts. In addition, the SN27P2 lacks many of the additional expansion options that you’d get with a traditional ATX motherboard.

Keep in mind that this isn’t a con of the SN27P2 in particular, these are the limitations of the SFF platform. In the end you do get what you pay for, as the SN27P2 is very well built, and as we just demonstrated, more than capable of keeping up with more conventional ATX motherboards when it comes to performance.

The difference is that all this is delivered in a significantly smaller, slick-looking package.