Parts Installation

We chose a low TDP Haswell CPU (i5-4570T) and a passive VGA to make the system as quiet as possible. After all, the PSU doesn't have enough juice to power a high-end VGA and strong CPU; and a high TDP CPU would also put a lot of pressure on the cooling system, forcing the cooling fan to work at high RPMs, which would produce lots of noise.


Here are the parts we installed into the SH87R6. We, as you can see, used a Seagate HDD with 1 TB capacity, Corsair Force LS 240 GB SSD, two G.SKILL Ripjaws X (2x 4 GB) 1600 MHz modules, and an Intel i5-4570T CPU (35W TDP, two physical cores).


Since Shuttle doesn't include an SSD adapter in the bundle, we used one that came bundled with an OCZ SSD.


This is what the drive cage looks like with an HDD installed. As you can see, it doesn't use a screw-less mounting mechanism, which is not a problem for us, though some users might prefer not having to use a screwdriver at all during the assembly process.


We installed the CPU first, the cooling system second, and everything else afterward, but you had better leave the drive cage for last.


Here is the barebone with all the necessary components installed. There is, as you will notice, enough room for a long VGA that is two slots high, but the 300 W PSU probably wouldn't be able to keep up if its power consumption is high. That said, you can thankfully upgrade to a larger 500 W PSU, but it won't come cheap.