BIOS

All Shuttle PCs we have reviewed so far come with a Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) BIOS named Aptio Setup Utility. Although a UEFI BIOS, it doesn't feature a modern interface that supports mouse input; it, on the contrary, has the old, classic interface you can only interact with through your keyboard. That said, it includes all the basic options and even an overclocking menu.


You will find the most interesting options, like CPU Configuration and Frequency & Voltage Configuration, in the Advanced tab.


The Power Management options allow you to enable or disable the EuP Function, which will have the system consume less than 0.5 W in standby.


You can check on the system's and CPU's temperatures in this menu, or the fans' speeds and CPU core and DRAM voltage levels. The BIOS even allows you to set the fan1's speed control mode, "smart fan mode" being the default. You can also set the CPU fan's speed to "ultra-low", "low", "mid", or "full." We, however, highly advise you to leave it as it is.


The CPU Configuration's setup screen varies depending on which processor is installed.


You can set either SATA or AHCI mode here; AHCI is preselected.


All onboard devices can be configured through these options.


The Overclocking tab is probably the most interesting to most of you. You can set the DRAM frequency, maximum OC ratio, and several voltage control options here. We chose not to overclock the i5-6600k CPU since it already utilizes Intel's Boost 2.0 technology, which increases its speed to 3.9 GHz under certain conditions. An even higher overclock would push the limits of the barebone's cooling system, and increased CPU temperatures would also increase noise output.


All available BIOS security options can be found here.


This is the Boot Options menu.

Performance

We usually test barebones without a dedicated graphics card and instead rely on the CPU's embedded graphics. This won't be the case today, though, since a GTX970 will be used.

PC Mark 07

The SZ170R8 obviously puts all other barebones we have evaluated thus far to shame.

3D Mark