Shuttle H7 7800H

The inside of the H7 7800H consists of the following hardware.

Based on Shuttle XPC Barebone SN78SH7
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ processor
2GB of DDR2-800 memory
25-in-1 card reader
Wireless-LAN
Hybrid Hauppage TV-tuner card
500 GB hard disk
Blu-ray/HD DVD combo drive

Our system was preloaded with Vista home premium, which we won’t test in this review. However we’ve tested it with the H7 7800H and it works like a charm.

Together with the XPC remote control that comes with this setup, it is easy to control your computer both starting up from standby mode and while in Windows. Easily use the remote to open up Windows Media Center and access all your movies, music and even use the tv-card.

This model was also preloaded with PowerDVD Ultra 7.3.

As said, the H7 7800H is based on the Shuttle XPC barebone SN78SH7. This barebone comes with a 300W SilentX power supply which should be enough for pretty much any HTPC hardware you can put into the barebone and then we’re not thinking of hardcore gaming graphics cards ;)

You might need a little bit more powerful power supply if you want to be able to fit the barebone with a high-end graphics card.

The motherboard inside this small beast is the FN78S. This motherboard is fitted with the NVIDIA GeForce 8200 chipset which holds both northbridge and southbridge but also the GPU. This is great as you only have one chipset to cool which both saves space and will be easier to keep the whole computer quiet.

The chipset is cooled by a small heatsink with a copper color, if it’s a copper cooler or an aluminium one that I can’t say, using a small fan on top to cool it. It does feel like aluminium and that is in fact cheaper than copper, so you never know ;)

If we have a look at the CPU socket we’ll see a heatpipe solution connected to a fan in the back of the case. This cooling is called I.C.E which stands for Integrated Cooling Engine and if you clock down your cpu and perhaps use one of the most energy efficient ones you might be able to turn off the fan or run it at the absolutely lowest speed.

At the time of review I was not able to find out if it is made out of aluminium or copper, or if it’s made out of both.

Running with the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ that we got with the H7 7800H, reveals that the fan doesn’t have to be running at max speed, even when playing movies. It keeps the noise from the fan down so much that if you place it around 2-3 meters away, near the tv-set you won’t hear it at all.

As I said, if you want a cpu that draws less power you can change it, but you can also change it if you want an even more powerful cpu. You can for example use AMD Phenom, Phenom II, Sempron and a lot of other AM2+ processors.

For the complete and gigantic list, have a look on the following link;
http://global.shuttle.com/support_list03.jsp?PI=939

Furthermore we can see that there are two memory slots which support the all so cheap DDR2 memory modules with speeds 533, 667 and 800 up to a total of 4 GB.

We also have the expansion slots and here we have one normal 32-bit PCI slot and one x16 PCI-Express slot. As seen on the image above, the tv-card is installed into the normal PCI slot.

A shot of the wifi-chip already installed.