What's Inside and Overclocking

- What's Inside

Opening up the latest Shuttle XPC you notice one of the main changes being the new cooler on top of the processor. It now uses a fin design to help dissipate the heat a lot better then coolers in the past - which is really handy considering the extra heat output of Prescott processors. The fins move the heat directly from the center of the cooler and proceed to let them go through the fins and out the back of the case as per the usual XPC cooling design.

Some people may also notice that the socket is also on an angle and you can see the corners of the 775 Socket out the side. This doesn't really affect the cooling as the complete core of the processor is still covered by the heatsink.

Moving to the right of the cooler we have our Dual Channel capable memory slots - just DDR. Installed already is the IDE connector for your CDROM and Hard Drive. If you look towards the bottom right you can see that there are two Serial ATA connectors for people who own Serial ATA hard drives.

Moving to the other end of the case you can find our PCI and AGP slot here. While this particular XPC unit does use Socket 775 LGA processors, due to the integration of the 875P chipset we still get AGP and PCI instead of PCI-E.

There really isn't anything too out of the ordinary on the inside as it still follows quite a similar design and look to previous Intel XPC's that have both AGP and PCI as there main connectivity. In the past previous XPC designs have worked very well so there is really no need to change anything, however once in a while as a reviewer it would be nice to see some changes.

- Overclocking

When it came to overclocking the processor we didn't expect much out of it but we were surprised that we could achieve a maximum front side bus of 223MHz. While we were able to get a little higher we did have trouble with the system running stable but at 223MHz we had absolutely no troubles.

It seems that the new heatsink design has helped a bit when it comes to cooling the Prescott as we were quite impressed with the result we received when it came to overclocking this SB77G5. We will see just what kind of performance difference this makes in the next few pages of our benchmarks.

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