Broken hardware, no customer service at all

Author's Rating:

Pros: None

Cons: It's a complete rip-off. I don't care what you buy, just avoid Shuttle.

The Bottom Line: 
Stay far away from any and all Shuttle products. The workmanship is crap, and the customer service is worse. I wouldn't recommend this to my worst enemy.

Author's Review
I bought a full system based on this platform from the Shuttle website 2 months back (Specs: G5 9570, AMD 64-bit 3500+ processor @2 GHz, 1GB dual-channel PC3200 RAM, 200GB hard disk). At least on paper, this is one nice machine. I was particularly tempted by the promise of whisper-quiet operation.

It arrived a week later, and I unpacked it. It looks cute, it's really compact and light, though I thought the black finish doesn't look as good in person as it does in the pictures. I was also a little disappointed by the noise level - it's not appreciably quieter than recent models from the major manufacturers, and it's really loud when it first starts up. The metal of the box is so thin that it doesn't do much to damp out noise, and as a result even with the quieter cooling system the net result is not so great. Also, the noise is higher pitched and more metallic-souding than that from your typical PC box, so if you're sensitive to sound and find high-pitched noises annoying this is not the box for you.

I turned it on. After a few minutes of just sitting there, it turned itself off. I tried again, lots of times, same thing.

I called Shuttle and after a couple of days of emailing them back and forth (they gave me lots of tests to run) they said the system was broken, and they would call me back with an RMA number and a shipping label. Two days later, they still hadn't called. I kept calling their number, and it was pretty much impossible to ever get a person on the line. I would leave messages, and no one would call back. Finally after a week and a half I had an RMA number and shipping label and I sent it back. They said they would ship a replacement as soon as they got my machine.

Two weeks later, no replacement. Call the RMA department, they never heard of my RMA number. The guy who answers the phone has great difficulty speaking English, and is very rude. He says Customer Service will call me back. They never do. Four weeks go by, with me calling them every day or two, and never getting anyone on the phone except a couple of times the same guy in RMA.

Four weeks later I finally get my replacement machine. It comes with a test report which says they ran a night-long burn-in and a memory test. I turn the machine on. It sits there for about 2 minutes, then turns itself off. I try the memory test they had told me to run the first time. 20 seconds in, the machine turns itself off. I try this 5 times. Same result each time.

So at this point I have a $1200 paperweight. I'm going to try and return it for a refund. Based on my past experience, it's going to be a battle, but I'm going to give these con artists a fight they will remember. I've sent emails, left voice mail (it's pretty much impossible to get hold of a person on their support number) but no response yet.

Take my advice, don't buy this piece of garbage. You may get lucky and receive a functioning piece of equipment, but you may not, and if it's broken you are going to regret doing business with these crooks.