Shuttle DS57U review - Introduction

Shuttle DS57U
A barebone fanless small formfactor mini (HT)PC

In this article we review the petite, tiny, and inaudible Shuttle DS57U bare-bone (HT)PC. A small form factor PC loaded with functionality. Over the past years we've seen a lot of things altered but most of all, in the PC industry. Where a PC 5 years ago was predominantly either a work or gaming rig, these days it has become more of a multi-media piece of hardware. We work on it, play games on it, listen to music on it, look at photos and watch movies on it. And especially with that last segment in mind, we noticed the PC making a move into the living room.

A couple of years ago when the PC entered that living room we all started a new trend building HTPCs for example, PCs designed for media playback of music and movies. However having a full blown, and often noisy, PC in the living room distracts and annoys a lot of people. To address that trend in the last year or so we have seen the HTPCs getting smaller and smaller and more silent. Especially with a lot of development in the GPU video processing segment and micro processors segments a nice and spicy HTPC these days can be very small. Pretty much what most people want these days is something compact and a noiseless product that accelerates and post processes high definition movies and music, preferably the content is streamed over a network. And that's where we land at net-tops and mini-tops. Shuttle has jumped on that market with their quite funky looking Broadwell Celeron based DS57U. In its bare essence this is pretty much a tiny PC that is armed with that 2-core Processor clocked at 1.50GHz. The embedded GPU implementation is fast enough to decode and accelerate 1080P video content perfectly, it comes with connectivity we see everything you need included, like HDMI with audio SPDIF pass through, two Gigabit Ethernet jacks and WiFi as well.

This puppy even offers USB 3.0 ports, mSATA and 2.5" SSD support as well. Not bad for a product that doesn't have any active fans right ? A very fun and interesting product alright. Let's have a peek first, and then head on on-wards to the next page.