Shuttle XS3510MA: dream come true

As you can see from previous pictures I am a HTPC fan. When Ion was debuted I tought I could build dream of my PC. But it did not happen from some reason. I mentioned Ion was not too strong. If it would not be enough, there was no supply in our little country or it was very expensive. I built a desktop PC again, of course with HTPC expects.

Ahead and back

Now here is Ion 2 and Shuttle. Good to know about the manufacturer, they can gave amazing hardwares out their hands. They really know barebone systems and committed to small machines. So when I said Shuttle cross my was is not a surprise. They released a computer family which gain and made me lover.

The X35 family is based on Intel Atom platform and really tiny. The three member deviate from each other in equipment. We can say with a little overact they have nothing in common. There are also more family members, but they are not new versions just have operating systems.

X35-704’s bum

X35-702 and X35-704 got base atom development. Processzor is a dual-core D510 both time with 1,66 GHz clock speed. The 702 has 160 GB HDD until 704 has an 320 GB model and DVD writer. They have the same capacity at graphics, memory and WiFi. They got Intel GMA 3150, 1 GB RAM and Wireless Network with N support.

Passive cooling, ventilation everywhere

The third member of family is a superstar and we got this for testing. We got XS35-GT-804 with OS, so quite right we has XD3510MA. Of course this is the top at X35’s. In this case it has 500 GB hard disk and memory grew up to 2 GB. Certainly these are not the all abilities, but we will testing it, so let’s see specification!

Case

Slim, 1,5 liters case
Size: 25,2 x 16,2 x 3,84 centimeters
Weight: 2,5 kilogramms (full development)
Back Kensington Lock
Optional: VESA75/100 integrate kit PV01

Operating System

Windows 7 Home Premium

Processor

Intel ATOM 510 dual-core 1,66 GHz (45 nm, FCBGA559, Hyper-Treading, Pineview-D)

Chipset

Intel NM10 Express Chipset

Graphics

Discrete second generation NVIDIA ION graphics with 512MB DDR3, HDMI and VGA (D-Sub) outputs, DirectX 10.1

Memory

1x SO-DIMM socket, 2GB DDR2-667/800

Storage

Slim-line DVD-writer
2,5” SATA 500 GB hard disc
4 in 1 card reader

Audio

IDT92HD81 Audio Codec with Azalia support
Two analog conncector (3,5 mm): 1. Line out (headphone) 2. microphone input
Digital Audio across HDMI port

Connection and network

HDMI (v1.3, max. resolution 2560 x 1600)
D-Sub VGA (max. resolution2048 x 1536)
5 x USB 2.0 (1 ahead, 4 back)
Ethernet, WLAN 802.11 b/g/n

Power Supply

External 40 Watt, without cooling

As you can see Shuttle XS3510MA is a quite good equiped and silent –because of the passive cooling– and surprisingly tiny machine. Even so it has everything what we wait from a HTPC. That was purpose of first page. We can see that here is the time, we should not calculate weeks with building a computer. We just go to a shop and bring a complete machine and put it next to the TV Set. It is beautiful, silent and small. There is no big difference in performance between my –two and a half years old- computer and Shuttle’s nettop. Of course these differences are our test subjects good.

We liked the simple form of little nettop, but for true it is not an over designed model. Front side is quite cute and we will wath that mostly. Power button is on the top of front side, it has two LED. They are inform us about power on state and working of hard disk. We can find here the slim optical drive. We got a DVD writer, but in the future we can change it to Blu-ray. Also here is a card reader and a USB port. Latter is very useful, because we can connect pendrive there.

Back of top model

To take the machine well breezing place is very important. The top and the lateral faces are the ventilations and because of the passive cooling it can be overheated. As you can see at specifications we do not have problems with networks. There is an Ethernet connection at back with 100 megabit bandwidth –why not gigabit?– and there is an N wifi at the inside. It has “only” 150 megabit bandwidth because of one antenna (1T1R). Picture output can be solved two way. There is a D-Sub and one HDMI. Resolution of two outputs are not the same.

We have to mention a negative thought. This is the missing digital audio output. Ok, HDMI perfect for it, but we do not support that. So we think there is enough place at least for an optical output. If we use D-Sub we can hear sound by headphone output because of this fault. This is an ugly black point.

We left two important informations to the end. Against the small case, the manufacturer putted computer toghether by changeable moduls. It helps us if we will extend nettop in the future. We can only swap HDD and optical drive at the strongest modell, but good to know that when we want Blu-ray, we can do it without dinamite.