Internals I
Nice, shiny and expensive-looking on the outside, how does it fare internally ?
The standard XPC pose. The tray that will hold your optical and hard drives comes away by removing the two screws to its left.
The tray, as you can see, will accept a single 5.25" device and two 3.5" devices. That, in normal speak, usually means a single optical drive and either 2 hard drives or a single drive with a floppy drive below. An all-in-one optical drive would be perfect. A DVD-ReWriter of some description seems to fit the bill.
With the tray out of the way, the innards are there for all to see. The SB61G2 looks remarkably similar to any other XPC, save the fan on the i865G Northbridge. It's required to run at 200FSB with ease and then handle integrated graphics duties without faltering. The confined, heat-generating nature of the XPC cubes almost necessitates the use of some kind of active cooling.
Shuttle have done a decent job in routing all the required cables. Even though it looks untidy on first appearance, you can access all the required parts without too much bother.
The all-new Intel ICH5 (non-R) provides support for 2 regular ATA100 (Intel scoffed at Maxtor's pseudo ATA133 standard) and 2 S-ATA (150MB/s) ports. Both the P-ATA and S-ATA ports are standalone affairs with no RAIDing ability. That's pretty sensible given the lack of space. S-ATA really does make sense in an XPC.
A closer look at the ICH5. Note the vertical battery position. As Tesco would say, every little helps when it comes to space saving.
