Judge me by my size, do you?
Open her up and you get to see that Shuttle doesn't have a whole lot of room to work with.
That not to say that you can't make good use of the 13.5-litre volume, though. At its base, the SX58J3 sports a Shuttle FX58V2 motherboard. The proprietary design, tailored to Shuttle's own form factor, makes use of solid capacitors and a combination of Intel's X58 chipset and ICH10R southbridge.
Bringing the goodness of the Nehalem architecture to a smaller form factor, the SX58J3 offers support for Intel Socket LGA1366 processors, tri-channel DDR3 memory and two graphics cards via a pair of CrossFire/SLI-compliant PCIe x16 expansion slots.
No small feat considering the size constraints, but Shuttle's mini board does forego certain features; there are no controllers for FireWire or USB 3.0, and you'll find no support for SATA 6Gbps.
Providing the juice for your choice of internal components is a suitably slim 500W power supply, certified as 80PLUS Bronze.
Shuttle's done well to squeeze in a half-kilowatt PSU, ensuring end users won't need to worry (too much) about power constraints when selecting their high-end graphics card of choice. Shuttle's official GPU support list suggests anything up to and including a Radeon HD 5870 is compatible with the system. Note, however, that NVIDIA's high-end GeForce GTX 480 and 470 aren't officially supported, although Shuttle has demonstrated an SX58J3 box running with top-of-the-line Fermi.
High-end CPUs aren't a problem, though, with Shuttle's system offering support for Intel's range-topping desktop processor, the hexa-core Core i7 980X.
Facilitated by the custom X58 board, said chip will be cooled by Shuttle's familiar Integrated Cooling Engine, a.k.a ICE. The all-in-one unit attaches to a temperature-controlled 92mm fan, uses heatpipe technology to transfer CPU heat out the rear of the chassis.
Helping aid air flow, ventilation holes are present on both sides of the chassis - critical for your hot-running GPU, we reckon.
Piling in the kit, we inserted three Corsair Dominator GTX DDR3 memory modules into the board's 3+1 DIMM slots. Up to 16GB of RAM at 1,333MHz is officially supported, and there's enough headroom for Corsair's elongated heatsinks.
That's joined by a dual-slot Radeon HD 5850 GPU - which, as you can see, fits in quite easily. There's plenty of room to attach the required power cables, but SLI/CrossFire configurations are, of course, restricted to single-slot cards.
If you're wanting to get the most out of your mini-PC, you'll also find that AMD's quickest single-GPU card - the ATI Radeon HD 5870 - is just about able to slot into place.
It takes a fair bit of manoeuvring to get it in, but once it's there, you can easily attach the six-pin power connectors.
The internals of the SX58J3 aren't as flashy as last year's SX58H7, which now retails for some £25 more, but it's still reasonably easy to build into.
Just be careful when you put the HDD/optical cage back in place - it leaves little to no room between the bays and the tops of the GPU power connectors.
Speaking of the HDD/optical cage, Shuttle's implementation supports two 3.5in disks and a single 5.25in optical drive. There's no mounting mechanism for 2.5in drives, but what is useful is that the system's cables are pre-routed neatly around the chassis - you simply need to plug them in to your components.
That's about two grand's worth of the latest-greatest tech in a 190mm-tall system. Let's see what the little beast can do.
