PC Size Means Everything

Shuttle XPC SB65G2: Design Hit In Black With WLAN

Packaging of Shuttle's bare-bones SB65G2

Elegant and black - Shuttle's bare-bones SB65G2 with Intel 865chipset and WLAN

Very good workmanship: ports and front-panel buttons

Exemplary: Placement and order of interfaces and buttons

A glance at package contents

It can't be said often enough: as far as workmanship and material appearance are concerned, Shuttle has a slight edge over the competition, which, however, has diminished recently. The uniformly black case is an eye-catcher across the board - and the best-looking case in the XPC series. Familiar from older bare-bones models is the front panel of the case, with jacks for USB 2.0, FireWire (small) and audio (microphone). On the back, it has network connectors, 4 USB 2.0 ports, and 5.1 sound and optical SP/DIF interfaces as well as the connection for the WLAN antenna. The interior setup is strongly reminiscent of previous models - equipment includes a heat pipe cooling system for the P4 processor. Finally, the Shuttle XPC SB65G2 is equipped with up-to-date hardware (based on the Intel 865PE chipset). The system achieves optimum performance when interacting with a P4 3.06 GHz (200 MHz FSB speed) and fast dual DDR400 memory. Otherwise, all P4 CPUs can be used with a FSB speed of 100 MHz or 133 MHz. Because performance is so important to Shuttle and no onboard graphics are available, an AGP graphics card must be obtained as an addition.