Shuttle XPC slim DH370 mini-PC Review: A Compact Digital Signage Powerhouse
by Ganesh T S on May 6, 2019 8:00 AM ESTHTPC Credentials - YouTube and Netflix Streaming
Our HTPC testing with respect to YouTube had been restricted to playback of a 1080p music video using the native HTML5 player in Firefox. The move to 4K, and the need to evaluate HDR support have made us choose Mystery Box's Peru 8K HDR 60FPS video as our test sample moving forward. On PCs running Windows, it is recommended that HDR streaming videos be viewed using the Microsoft Edge browser after putting the desktop in HDR mode.
As expected, we get the VP9 Profile 2 4K HDR stream and Edge is able to play it back without any issues. Various metrics of interest such as GPU usage and at-wall power consumption were recorded for the first four minutes of the playback of the above video. The numbers are graphed below.
The GPU load is around 75% and the media engine load around 35%. At the wall, the system consumes around 35W in the steady state, with the GPU alone accounting for slightly less than 5W.
The Netflix 4K HDR capability works with native Windows Store app as well as the Microsoft Edge browser. We used the Windows Store app to evaluate the playback of Season 4 Episode 4 of the Netflix Test Patterns title. The OS screenshot facilities obviously can't capture the video being played back. However, the debug OSD (reachable by Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D) can be recorded.
The (hevc,hdr,prk) entry corresponding to the Video Track in the debug OSD, along with the A/V bitrate details (192 kbps / 16 Mbps) indicate that the HDR stream is indeed being played back. Similar to the YouTube streaming case, metrics such as GPU usage and at-wall power consumption were recorded for the first three minutes of the playback of the title. The numbers are graphed below.
In the steady state, the GPU and media engine loads are around 70%, with the hardware decoder being loaded at slightly south of 50%. The at-wall power is around 28W, withthe GPU alone contributing around 5W to that number.
Overall, the Shuttle XPC slim DH370 ticks all the boxes for OTT streaming capabilities. It is, however, not particularly power efficient while doing that.
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Guspaz - Wednesday, May 8, 2019 - link
It has to do with the subject of my post. Shuttle sells this as a barebones claiming support for products meeting certain standards. And I’m warning that in the past they have made that claim in a way that is misleading at best and false at worst.Skeptical123 - Wednesday, May 8, 2019 - link
I personal agree with the content of the article in that it's a good box for the use case and price. Except for this one snippet that too many tech reviews have, its good but could be better if it had these expensive rarely used but cool to have features. The reality is this is a custom product for a limited market and regardless of that there is still a lot of competitions in the small form factor pc space around the mid $300 mark. Meaning the company needed to meet a certain price target which I think we can all agree they did at $330. The additional chip required for thunderbolt 3 from intel along costs up to $10s alone. Regardless any additional thunderbolt enclosure would add to the size of the unit which kinda defeats the whole point. And the reality is the people buying these systems know what they're looking for and if they find this product they can defiantly find a similar product that has what they want, say a 10gig Nic integrated in a similar size for a little more $. The company could have chosen to make that product, they did not. That is not a bad thing nor a bad decision.Skeptical123 - Wednesday, May 8, 2019 - link
the quote from the article "Shuttle does have scope for improving the DH370 further - for starters, we would have liked a couple of the USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A ports to be Type-C. A Thunderbolt 3 port would have also been nice to have, given that spare PCIe lanes from the PCH as well as the CPU are available."jiangann - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
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"It is likely that driving three 4Kp60 displays can take up a significant chunk of the available bandwidth, resulting in the performance loss that we see above"Not that significant - 3840*2160 pixels * 4 bytes per pixel * 3 displays * 60fps is 6GByte/sec and the machine supposedly has 40GByte/sec available.
censtry - Thursday, October 15, 2020 - link
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