Introduction

Shuttle has succeeded the popular SB61G2 with their latest advance into the SFF market, the SB65G2 XPC. Sporting the popular G2 series case design, including the all aluminum front faceplate, the SB65G2 has a lot to offer. While this system doesn?t feature many visible new additions from the outside, it certainly packs a punch on the inside as you?ll soon see. Today we?re going to be reviewing the SB65G2 from the perspective of the type of users this system was engineered for? enthusiasts and overclockers.

 

The SB65G2 is powered by the Intel i865PE Chipset, featuring the same underlying architecture as the SB61G2 and SB62G2 XPCs which are powered by the similar Intel i865G. While all three machines support the latest Intel Pentium 4 processors, the SB65G2 does away with on-board video in lieu of several advanced overclocking features.

Don?t get the SB65G2 with its i865PE chipset confused with the Intel i865P, which only supports 400 and 533MHz FSB processors. This XPC allows you to exploit the full potential of the latest 800MHz FSB Pentium 4?s as well as dual channel DDR. Intel Pentium 4 / Celeron 478-pin processors are supported, including the Northwood and Prescott cores. Willamette based Pentium 4?s aren?t supported; luckily there were very few of these in production.

We were surprised to see Shuttle has opted to include the SB65G2 with the ICH5 Southbridge instead of the ICH5-R. The primary difference being that the ICH5, and therefore the SB65G2 does not support SATA RAID. However, on the positive side, Shuttle has added an integrated 802.11b wireless Ethernet controller.

Before we delve into the details, lets start with the overall system specifications:

Processor	Intel Pentium 4 / Celeron 478-pin Northwood and Prescott
Chipset	Intel i865PE + ICH5
Memory	2 x 184 pin DDR SDRAM up to 2GB at PC3200
Audio	Realtek ALC650 AC?97 5.1 Channel Audio Controller
LAN	Realtek 8100B 10/100 Fast Ethernet
PSU	Achme 220W 110/230V AC
Dimensions:	300mm(L) x 200mm(W) x 185mm(H)
Parallel ATA	Two UDMA-100 Dual Channel PATA Ports
Serial ATA	Two UDMA-150 SATA Ports
On-Board Video	None
PCI	1 x 33MHz
AGP	1 x AGP 4X/8X
Other Internal Headers	1 x Floppy Disk 1 x Parallel Port 1 x IrDA 1 x WKMC 3 x Fan 1 x CD-In

Front Panel Connections

2 x USB 2.0 1 x Firewire 1394a (4-Pin) 1 x Mic In 1 x Line Out 1 x Headphone Out 1 x Power Button 1 x Reset Button 1 x Power LED 1 x IDE Activity LED

Rear Panel Connections

4 x USB 2.0 1 x Firewire 1394a (6-Pin) 1 x PS/2 Mouse 1 x PS/2 Keyboard 1 x Audio Front Out 1 x Audio Rear Out 1 x Audio Center/Bass Out 1 x RJ45 LAN 1 x Serial Port (9-pin) 1 x SPDIF In 1 x SPDIF Out 1 x PCI Slot 1 x AGP Slot 1 x Wireless Ethernet Antenna

With all the different Shuttle SB6X models out there, which one is right for you? Read on and we?ll attempt to help you make your decision.

Let?s begin by taking a close look at the case externals?

Benchmarks & Overclocking

Benchmarks & Overclocking

With the goal of benchmarking overclocking performance, we opted to increase the system FSB, starting with the stock 200Mhz setting and working our way up until the system became unstable. AGP/PCI/Serial-ATA clock settings were held constant at 66/33/100Mhz respectively during all initial testing.

After running through our suite of benchmarks at 200Mhz, we slowly increased the FSB to 210Mhz for another benchmarking run. That seemed to easy, so we jumped to 225Mhz. Still going strong. The next move was up to 250Mhz. No problems yet. At this point, our Pentium 4 2.4GHz C processor was performing at a cool 3GHz, while our Corsair ProSeries XMS PC4000 was performing at maximum spec, DDR500.

The next jump was to 275Mhz. Suffice to say, we didn?t get far. After a quick CMOS reset, we jumped back down to 265Mhz. The system booted, but soon ran into stability issues. At a 260Mhz FSB, we got so far as through most of PCMark, but then experienced a random reboot. The maximum FSB we were able to achieve with reliable performance was 255Mhz, putting our processor at 3.06GHz and our DDR at 510Mhz. These are some of the most aggressive FSB and memory timings we?ve seen yet to date, which says a lot for this motherboard as well as the Corsair ProSeries XMS DDR modules. If you?d like more information on this memory, you can find our Sudhian review here.

In the meantime, let?s continue with our full overclocking benchmark data:

 

 
 
 

These are some pretty impressive gains in performance, almost 30% in some cases due to overclocking alone. Keep in mind that your overclocking results may vary, as actual performance is tied heavily to the specific CPU and memory modules used in the system.

Our next step was to ignore Shuttle?s warning concerning the AGP/PCI/Serial-ATA clock setting, and attempt to overclock it from its stock 66/33/100Mhz setting up to the next allowable setting, which is 73/36/100Mhz. Upon boot, the Bios could not detect our Serial-ATA drive. I guess Shuttle wasn?t kidding on this one. Overclocking the PCI bus seems to baffle the on-board Serial-ATA system completely. One would be led to believe that you may be able to successfully overclock these buses when using PATA storage.

You can compare your PC Mark 2002 scores against our SB65G2 "stock" test system with this link to MadOnion.

One last note on the wireless Ethernet adapter. Software installation was absolutely simple and only involved installing the driver included on the provided CD. Shuttle also included a built in monitoring utility from PRISM, presumably the wireless chipset manufacturer. This utility program provides details on the current connection state, speed, throughput, link quality, and signal strength. Here?s a screen shot:

 

We were able to achieve a full 11Mbps connection at approximately 90 ft from our SMC wireless access point. While this test is subjective and results vary highly depending on the surrounding environment, we did find the performance to be adequate and what one would expect from a standard 802.11b adapter with external antenna.

And finally...

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• External Design (1 of 8)
• Internal Design (2 of 8)
• PSU and Cooling (3 of 8)
• Wireless LAN / Motherboard (4 of 8)
• Bios (5 of 8)
• Testbench Setup (6 of 8)
• Benchmarks & Overclocking (7 of 8)
• Conclusion (8 of 8)