SB75G2 Externals
All Shuttle XPCs arrive in a similar packaging. Salient points are highlighted on the cover. Shuttle has made special mention of the near-silent 250w PSU. Shuttle believes that not only should an XPC have a small enough footprint to sit on the narrowest of desks, it should also be quiet in use. Shuttle's made a concerted effort to minimise the sound profile for each new iteration of cubes. An aside, the Canterwood or i875P chipset runs best with a 200MHz FSB Pentium 4 CPU and DDR400 memory. It supports Hyper-Threading, naturally. There's no reason why one couldn't use a S478 Celeron, but that would be missing the performance point.
The front is classic Shuttle. There's been a steady design shift over the last year or so. Shuttle's tried using a plastic front, a mirrored look, a two-tone finish, and a few other variations that made users either love or hate the design. We reckon the black aluminium front, as shown on the SB75G2, is the best-looking chassis. It's understated and yet elegant at the same time. The front has the usual single 5.25" and 3.5" bays at the top, buttons and lights in the centre, and ports at the bottom. In true Shuttle style, one can't hide the ports with a drop-down cover.
Power and hard drive activity lights make for an aesthetically pleasing front which, subjectively, is spoilt by the bare ports beneath. There's the standard Line-In, Microphone, headphone, 2x USB 2.0, and a single 4-pin FireWire port. Shuttle's burgeoning list of accessories allows for a multicard reader (black, of course) to be used in lieu of a floppy drive. EPoX recently introduced its own cube with a front-mounted LCD screen. We reckon that would spoil the look of the G2 chassis, though.
Shuttle uses a mesh seethrough on both sides. It has the dual benefit of giving cooling a helping hand and looking good.
Shuttle XPCs are all pretty similar in terms of features. The back is almost always identical, save for an HD15 connection from Northbridge-attached graphics (Intel Extreme Graphics 2 with the i865G chipset). The SB75G2 is all about performance, so there's no bandwidth-stealing GPUs to cater for. As is the norm, the ICE cooler dominates the centre, backplates for the AGP and single PCI slot on the right, and more ports and interfaces on the bottom.
2 serial ports, a standard 6-pin FireWire port, 4 further USB 2.0 ports, an RJ45 jack, PS/2 ports, and more analogue sound ports (that's a lot of ports!) provide enough connectivity for most scenarios. Oddly, the S/PDIF ports are located in the top-right corner. The G2 chassis' rear has a small circular cutout that supports the optional Wireless connectivity module. The layout works; Shuttle's proved that over time. Our only slight concern is with the lack of ingenuity over the past two years.
