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?

Testbench Setup

Testbench Setup

As part of the review process, we installed the following components within the SB65G2:

Processor	Pentium 4 2.4GHz C
Memory	2 x 512 MB Corsair Pro Series XMS TwinX DDR500
Video	Gainward GeForce4 ti4200 Golden Sample
Storage	Western Digital Raptor SATA 36GB, 10K RPM
CD-RW	Norcent 40X

Our fully configured test system:

 

Our strategy in benchmarking this system was to provide you with as much overclocking data as possible. To that end, we opted to use PCMark 2002 and SiSoft Sandra 2003 for testing with various overclocking strategies.

All testing was completed under Windows XP Professional, with nVidia v45.23 WHQL Certified video drivers. Intel i865 Chipset, Audio, and LAN drivers were installed directly from the provided SB65G2 Shuttle Driver CD. Video display settings were set to 1024x768 with 32-bit color at a 60Hz refresh rate.

DDR memory timings were held constant at 3,7,4,4 for the duration of the testing. Note, these are the most aggressive settings we could reliably boot with, using our Corsair ProSeries XMS DDR500 TwinX modules.

All benchmarks were run three times to average results accordingly. Three hours of continuous MemTest86 testing was used to validate memory timings prior to benchmarking.

So how well does the system perform??

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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)