Shuttle SD11G5

Removing the cover

There is the usual space for two 3.5” hard disks, or one hard disk and an X-in-1 memory card reader if you still use one, plus one 5.25” CD/DVD drive. Because the CD/DVD drive is hidden behind the front flap, it has an adjustable bar to enable the external button to press the internal one of your drive, so any tray loading drive will fit.

There are enough power plugs provided for all combinations as you get 3 molex and two SATA power plugs. There’s even a 6-pin PCI-Express graphics card plug carefully routed around to where you need it. In place of the PSU there’s the internal sound daughterboard securely screwed in the side. You may notice some things are missing; like there is no floppy connector, nor any serial ports. To those few that still need these legacy connectors, this XPC is obviously not for you, but then, get with the times!

The mini PCI slot allows the use of laptop wireless cards so you can get the whole 'Centrino' deal. In fact, if you could get an Intel wireless card, could this be the first Centrino desktop?

The incorporation of a PCI-Express x1 slot instead of a standard legacy PCI slot means the mini PCI slot covers more consumer bases so is even more welcome. Finding anything bar Gigabit Ethernet or ATI TV card on PCI-Express x1 card is still pretty impossible.

The PCI-Express x16 slot will only fit single slot coolers, so your new X1800XT or slightly older 6800 Ultra video card wont fit. Having said that, video cards like NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GT will fit. Also, due to the chunky 220W PSU it can provide more than enough to power video cards such as the 7800 GT.

The lack of DDR support as well as DDR2 is due to size constraints of the motherboard. We’ve previously shown that dual channel DDR2 533MHz offers little over single channel DDR 333MHz because of the way the Pentium M is architected. Thus, you could get away with buying a single 1GB stick of very cheap DDR2 400MHz, while spending the money saved on a better CPU or video card and not suffer from a significant hit on performance from a lack of memory bandwidth. This would mean you'd have to buy an identical stick to fill the other slot, but as there are only 2 slots to fill you would have upgrade space.

Whilst people do hold reservations about Creative audio, you get the uprated Creative Live! 24-bit/96KHz chip that supports up to 7.1 channel High Definition audio. If you’re not a fan of the software, don’t worry because there is a 'driver only' installation option.

Both chipsets are passively cooled which means both IGP and PSU are totally silent. Combined with the Pentium M and large CPU fan this creates the quietest Shuttle I’ve ever used.