After you get everything secured and in place, the Shuttle SH81R4 is complete and what's left is to install an operating system. In our case we used the latest Windows 8.1 Pro and installed it using a USB stick. The installation went smooth and within minutes it was completed, with most of the internal components already recognized without needing to install any additional drivers. Of course you can get latest drivers from Shuttle. For our tests we installed the following drivers:

• Intel RST 13.5.0.1056
• Intel INF 10.0.21
• Realtek HDA 7365
• Realtek Lan 8035

Note that Windows 8.1 had already recognized both LAN and Wifi modules (both Realtek-based). However, the Audio HDA drivers had to be installed. We also installed the ClassicShell 4.1.0.

To sum up, the system had the following configuration:

• Box/Motherboard: Shuttle SH81R4
• CPU: Intel i7-4790 Retail
• CPU Fan: Shuttle I.C.E. (Integrated Cooling Engine)
• Memory: Crucial 16GB (2x8GB) kit DDR3-1600 CL11t
• Storage: Crucial M550 512GB SSD
• Storage: Toshiba SSHD (MQ01ABDH100H) 1TB
• Windows: 8.1 Pro with all the latest available updates installed
• BIOS v1.03 American Megatrends
• Benchmark/Monitor software: PCMark 7, PCMark 8, 3DMark 05, 06, 11, Sisoft Sandra 2014 SP3e, K-Lite Codec Pack 10.8.5, CineBench R10, R11.5, R15, Intel Extreme Tuning Utility v5.1.1, HWMonitor 1.25, AIDA64 Extreme build 3226
  

The CPU-Z and GPU-Z utilities provide more information about the system:

before we start our benchmarks, we took a look at the simple Windows Index ranking. But since Microsoft removed it from Windows 8.1, we used a third-party software. Our Intel i7-4790 processor got a 8.4 score, while the "weakest" element was the Intel HD 4600 GPU (5.8 score) , which is part of the Intel i7-4790 processor:

We checked the memory performance using the AIDA64 Extreme benchmark, which returned very good results:

At the AIDA64 Extreme CPU/FPU tests we also very encouraging using the installed i7-4790 processor. You can click on each result in the table below and get a comparison with other systems:

Below you can check the results with the CineBench benchmarks, which showed a very competitive performance for the Shuttle SH81R4:

The PCMark 7 returned an overall score of 6477:

The PCMark 8 results are provided below:

We move on with the performance of the Intel HD4600 graphics:

Last but not least, the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility showed 881 marks:

We monitored the temperatures of the various components inside the SH81R4 using the HWMonitor software.

The Intel i7-4790 CPU idles at 36-39 degrees Celsius, but it became rather hot with its temperature rising at 76-79 degrees Celsius after a two-hour Prime95 run.