Shuttle ST20G5

As with the SN25P and previous XPC's the cable management inside the ST20G5 is no different: it is absolutely fantastic. Every cable is carefully routed around the edge of the chassis in a tidy manner, using clips or cable ties to maximise the available space. The only downside is that the surplus power cables from the 240W PSU are a little short for some applications, meaning that they can not be managed with quite the same neatness as the rest of the cabling.

As already mentioned, Shuttle includes a 240W Active PFC power supply unit, which does support all the latest AMD Athlon 64 socket 939 CPUs, including the Athlon 64 X2 processors that were released a couple of months back now, as we mentioned previously. The latter will, of course, require a BIOS update.

One slight problem that we found with the power supply unit was that it did not have a 6-pin PCI-Express power connector as included on most all high-end PCI-Express video cards requiring additional power. However, our GeForce 6800 GT was stable during testing while using a supplementary power adapter.

As with other G styling chassis, there is enough room for a maximum of two hard disks, or a single hard disk and external 3.5” drive as well as a single 5.25” drive in the top bay. The whole drive bay unit comes out so installation of the drives and components underneath is extremely easy.

The ICE cooling unit has also been upgraded to include a 92mm fan instead of the more conventional 80mm fan, providing more airflow, or better still: the same airflow at a lower fan speed, allowing for quieter operation. Indeed, during non-intensive computing the fan speed is inaudible, and as the system heats up when used intensively there fan speed will gradually increase to try to compensate.