Product Listing

Shuttle XPC Prima SX38P2 Pro (Intel X38)

By Vincent Chang - 4 Mar 2008

Interior Part 2

Interior Part 2

Shuttle's I.C.E heatsink is used again for cooling the CPU. This consists of an aluminum heat pipe based cooler together with a single fan. This fan is responsible for pulling in cool air from outside the chassis. There are ventilation holes that correspond to the position of the fan, such that an air channel (or tube) is formed going from left to right of the chassis, and passing by the CPU heatsink. A larger fan behind the heatsink is used to remove the now warmer air from the chassis.

Again, another of Shuttle's typical SFF trademark makes it appearance here. The ICE heat pipe based cooler is however running at rather high speeds of around 3000rpm and can be quite noisy. It can even go up to 4000rpm if you can withstand the noise.

We set the fans to dynamic mode in the BIOS and they would increase or decrease according to the system temperatures. From our experience with an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (3.0GHz) processor, the fans were quite noisy and a check with Shuttle's XPC Tools showed them to be running at around 3000RPM. At idle, our CPU temperature hovered around 50 degrees Celsius but this quickly jumped to slightly above 70 once we ran anything intensive. So if you're planning to use a higher end processor, noise could be a necessary evil to keep the CPU cool and healthy. Dual-core Wolfdale processors should however be a cinch as their TDP is half of the processor used for testing. Still, the kind of temperatures noted and high fan speed might be a concern for those who want to implant quad-core processors in this system.

Shuttle has included its own monitoring and tweaking tool, XPC Tools that gives the temperature and fan speed of the various smart fans in the chassis.

Another part of the cooling system onboard the Shuttle. Here, MOSFETs are the focus of this radiator. Solid capacitors are also used throughout the board.

Cooling of the motherboard components is handled by Shuttle's OASIS cooling technology, which seems to be the typical maze of silent heat pipes and radiators that covers most of the warmer parts like the Northbridge, Southbridge and MOSFETs. And if you missed our specification table, this Shuttle SX38P2 Pro has everything that you can expect to find on a full sized Intel X38 motherboard. That includes support for 45nm Core 2 processors and the full complement of PCIe 2.0 x16 lanes. There's also Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire-400, SATA 3.0Gbps and HD audio courtesy of a Realtek ALC888DD codec, supporting 7.1 channels and Dolby Digital Live! and DTS Connect. The only two shortcomings one could pin onto this motherboard is its lack of DDR3 memory support, but at its current cost, DDR2 seems like a much wiser choice. The other is the practicality of implementing a CrossFire setup in the small confines of this SFF. Still, Shuttle has largely succeeded in porting the high-end Intel X38 chipset over to its SFF, just like the other enthusiast class chipsets that it has attempted previously.

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