The Unit - Inside

With three thumbscrews coming off without any effort we remove the case cover and begin to dive inside the whole unit. If you've used a Shuttle before the new SG33G5 won't be anything out of the ordinary and follows the same standard design that we have become accustomed to.

In the world of expansion we have both a PCI E x16 slot alongside a PCI slot. These are no doubt the two most important slots when it comes down to it, and when you're in a position where you can only have two slots this is what you would be choosing. What we would have liked to have seen though was the PCI Express slot go on the inside as opposed to the outside, this would have given us the opportunity to use a video card that takes up dual slots.

Hard drive connectivity is pretty good, packing a single IDE that gives us up to two devices we also have three SATA ports alongside our floppy disc connector. Out of the box the XPC comes already equipped with a single SATA and IDE cable plugged in and neatly routed throughout the case. Here we also see a decent sized passive cooler to help keep the northbridge temperatures down.

Squeezed down the back corner on either side of our two RAM slots which offer support for up to 4GB of DDR2 667/800MHz are the two power connectors for the motherboard. While it looks like it may get in the way of installing the ram, going in from the top of the case makes RAM installation an absolute breeze.

When it comes down to the cooling setup the ICE rig consists of two main parts. We have a single plate is mounted straight over the top of the CPU via four screws which give us a very strong and even mount. From there we have three pipes that shoot out the back and go up to a radiator like grill. A single 92mm fan is used to cool this while the air is pushed out the rear of the case.

This particular design has been used for as long as we can remember and generally seems to work great for Shuttle.

The whole system is powered with a little 250Watt power supply that has a single 16A 12V rail. It's clear that you're not going to be putting any power house video card in the system.