Externals II
Changes to the front, but is the back still the same ?
'Fraid so. After all, most of the attention will be focussed on the front. Shuttle's standard rear layout remains intact. That entails ports and sockets at the bottom, two blanking plates for the AGP port and single PCI slot on the right, and a holed central section that's reserved for assisting the cooler's fan in expelling the heat drawn up from the CPU. To the left of it is the usual PSU's fan cutout. Before we condemn it as a standard, boring back panel, closer inspection of the top left-hand side shows the existence of a Wireless antenna plug. The SB65G2 had almost exactly the same layout and it also supported Wireless connectivity straight out of the box.. The associated bundle contains the expected antenna that screws on to the host.
Et voila !. The introduction hinted at the RefleXion taking the best bits out of other XPCs and using it in one package. The 6-in-1 card reader, supplied and pre-fitted DVD-ROM drive and Wireless connectivity are three such features that haven't been present in a single design. They're, subjectively speaking, three of the more useful additions Shuttle could have made.
A closer look at the ports shows that onboard video is present here, too (evidenced by the HD15 connection on the left). 4x USB2.0 and a standard FireWire port gives the RefleXion enough high-speed usage, we feel. Adding in the two USB2.0 ports at the front and the USB 2.0-powered card reader and USB1.1 Wireless connection makes 8 used ports in total. It's just as well that the ICH5R supports that number. There's only a limited amount of space here, so the usual Parallel port was given the boot. S/PDIF ports are increasingly located at the top-right of the rear section. Both input and output are optical in nature. We implore Shuttle to add either an S-Video or DVI connection to the back panel. That would open up the onboard video's possibilities.
The larger box can be attributed to the Shuttle XPC carry bag that's included in the overall RefleXion package. It's the same bag that's available as an optional extra, as is the card reader, DVD-ROM drive, and Wireless module. We suppose it is deserving of its special edition tag. Carrying on the individual theme are three black cables (2 were in the XPC at the time of the shot). The standard floppy, ATA100 (hard drive) and twisted ATA33 (DVD-ROM) all have the style makeover. A blue Shuttle SATA cable, mirror wiper, screws and power plug complete the hardware additions. The carry bag actually arrives in another Shuttle embossed bag. Nice, eh ?.
Then another embossed bag holds the 3 manuals. The one on the right is a thick tome that illustrates construction with colour photographs and in a multitude of languages. Shuttle can be brief in its motherboard manuals. That's the kind of feeling that we get here. However, most of the components are pre-attached so there's little need to go into huge amounts of detail. InterVideo's WinDVD 4 is a welcome inclusion. We like the fact that the driver CD gives the opportunity of installing all the necessary drivers in 'auto' fashion. That attempts to install what it thinks are the needed drivers. It worked well enough. That's what we need, that is, the simplest possible method of installing everything. Why should we have to manually install, say, 10 drivers before we get a truly usable desktop ?. There's another CD that's just Shuttle in PR mode. Fancy models act out just why your life needs an XPC small form-factor system (enter sarcasm html here).
