Review on 💻 Shuttle XPC Slim DH410S Mini Barebone PC Intel H410, Support 65W Cometlake-s LGA1200 CPU, No RAM, No HDD/SSD, No CPU, No OS, No Vesa Mount by Josh Boii

I bought this XPC from Shuttle to build a pfSense firewall and replace my ASUS router. It was a resounding success, taking only a few hours from unboxing to a completely reconfigured network. There are a few things to keep in mind if you plan to do this: pfSense does NOT like Realtek NICs. This Shuttle XPC DH370 is equipped with two INTEL network adapters and they work perfectly. I chose the Intel Core i3-8100 processor because it supports AES-NI. It runs at a very comfortable 40°C thanks to the shuttle heatsink and dual fans designed specifically for the tiny chassis. I don't hear any noise from the machine while it's on, until I pick it up and hold it to my face; Only then do I hear the airflow from the fans. The supplied BIOS version was already the version I needed (1.04) which saved me a lot of time. It tucks away nicely in my side table along with all my other networking gear. The design of the case is convenient in work. The pieces are designed to snap comfortably into place, and you only need to remove three screws to remove the case and SSD drive bracket. The custom CPU heatsink and fan screws are properly aligned with the mounting points on the motherboard, allowing them to screw in cleanly after the thermal grease is applied to the CPU. Don't forget to pre-wipe the contact surfaces with alcohol. The board already has a built-in combo connection cable for power supply and data transfer of the SSD. It also accepts SODIMM DDR4 laptop memory from which I booted 8GB Kingston HyperX (in a 2x4GB configuration) and specified 2GB temporary and variable disks as RAM disks for pfSense. The software is fast, the box is quiet and incredibly small. I chose a 250GB WD Blue SSD; works great, way more than i need but who cares! These SSDs are so cheap; The Corsair GTX USB stick I used to install pfSense cost almost twice as much, but it confirmed that the USB 3.1 ports were working properly (400MB/s was seen from the FreeBSD drive speed test notes when pfSense was booted from Corsair ). You turn on the whole machine with heatsink and fans for the first time and turn off the motherboard, the BIOS spins the fans up to full speed and then spins them back down to check them and you CAN hear them very slightly. I believe if you plan on using one of these under constant load, it will NOT be silent. However, you CAN turn off the fans and continue to use the machine as is. I didn't stress test that way, so I can't say how hot it gets, but I did a "bench test" before building and the bare CPU ran at 91C. If you really break in If you need a SILENT bookshelf-sized setup with desktop performance, they won't stop you from turning off the fans and just using a heatsink. If the temperature with passive cooling is below 80°C, you are almost in gold. I am very happy that everything worked out. I patiently waited for all the details to arrive and everything went smoothly when it did. I was and am a Shuttle fan; My last shuttle build was an AMD based XPC for a recording studio. This machine literally NEVER died after years of continuous use; it's in my closet now. I definitely recommend the DH370 to anyone who wants to do the "hard work" in a small package or build a powerful pfSense firewall. Go crazy, set up huge firewall rules tables, turn on web filters, your neighbor's VLAN children steal your WiFi in the VPN tunnel across the Atlantic, log every useless message to disk. Can't wait to see what else this thing can do!