Power draw and temperature
Good news for the green-minded user. Despite offering better all-round performance, the Shuttle SH55J2 consumes far less power than our two-year old comparison system.
Even the addition of a mid-range discrete GPU doesn't change that fact.
Temperatures are always a concern when housing potent components in a compact space, but cooling the 87W Core i5 661 isn't a problem for the SH55J2.
Idle and load temperatures - the latter defined as a 10-minute stint of Prime95 across all available threads - are both kept suitably under control.
But whilst the ICE cooler makes light work of CPU cooling, the SH55J2 chassis doesn't provide a whole lot of airflow to discrete GPUs.
During testing on a hot-and-humid day, our mid-range Radeon HD 5770 hit close to 90°C during a 10-minute run of the Furmark stress test.
