Moreover, the barebone-kit comes shipped with preinstalled cables for hard drives, power cables from the PSU are wisely split and laid out along the racks (to the supposed usage location) and fixed with clips. Interface connectors for the front panel are wisely laid out on the front edge of the board, connectors for S/PDIF cables and audio jacks, as well as a header for the CPU fan are placed at the back edge. Besides, the standard knob of this lever can be replaced for a larger one, included into the bundle.Ī remarkable feature of G5 interior is a complete lack of cable jungle, so typical of the previous generations of Shuttle chassis. The cage is equipped with an isolating layer in the place where it may touch a video card, a convenient cable holder is attached to its bottom.Īccess to the 5-inch bay from within allows to align the extension mechanism of the eject button, if the corresponding button on the faceplate of a CD/DVD drive is not in its standard place.
Then it should be put back into place to proceed to CD/DVD drive installation in the upper bay afterwards. The drive cage is quite standard, it can easily accommodate two hard drives or a hard drive and a floppy drive. Thus, it will take several seconds to get a system ready for assemblage and upgrades, almost without a screwdriver. Interior arrangement and functionalityĪs usual, to remove the lid from the SB77G5 chassis, you just have to unscrew three wing nuts on the rear panel, another two screws to pull out the drive cage, and four latches holding the front panel. There is a small hole on the rear panel between the audio jacks and the room for expansion cards - as you may already know, it's used to access the CMOS reset button (very convenient to use).
There are no COM ports, you can install a parallel port if you buy a bracket. The motherboard allows to add four USB ports (you can purchase a corresponding rear panel bracket) and can accommodate two expansion cards. It's possible to receive and transmit audio in digital form - the system has the optical S/PDIF In/Out. Here is the set of standard connectors: PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, FireWire, 2 x USB (2.0), LAN (Gigabit Ethernet), and 5 x Analog Audio to output 8-ch sound. The rear panel looks like in most modern barebone-kits, but it has analog VGA-Out and DVI-out at that. They are all duplicated on the rear panel, which allows to use the front panel only for short-time connections (the case is not that attractive with open covers). A set of interface connectors is typical for modern models: two standard audio jacks (microphone and headphones), 2 x USB (2.0), and 1 x mini-FireWire (4-pin, without power).
The chassis is (as always) made of aluminium, this model is painted gray, the plastic front panel is mostly covered with slightly rough aluminium plates - it looks great! The chassis is of standard dimensions (for Shuttle XPC) - 200x300x185 mm(WxDxH).Ĭovers on the 3-inch external bay and on the group of connectors on the front panel are opened manually silvery power and reset buttons as well as power and HDD activity indicators are located between them. The 5-inch bay cover is traditionally spring-loaded so that it opens when the CD/DVD-drive tray ejects and automatically closes after a disc is loaded. G5 chassis offers hinged lids on drive bays and interface connectors. You may read about these details in the review of Shuttle XPC SB77G5. Of course, the review will not shrink to a couple of paragraphs, but you should keep in mind that many details will be omitted.
As a result, we have decided upon the following format of the ST20G5: this barebone-kit will be reviewed as a combination of new functionality and the already reviewed chassis. Secondly, its "innards": Socket 939 for Athlon 64/FX/X2 to any taste (from cheap workhorses to the most powerful processors on the market) and a chipset from ATI with integrated video - the only integrated chipset, which can be tested in modern games and which is on a par with its competitors in 2D performance. What's so interesting about the ST20G5? First of all, its chassis with an objectively better (among Shuttle products and similar barebone-kits from competitors) noise level and subjectively better design of the front panel and exterior in general. But the bait (to examine such an interesting sample, which found its way to our testlab anyway) proved to be too much for us. We decided to pay more attention not just to various models, but to systems with different innards and exteriors, focusing on Shuttle XPC in unexamined chassis models in particular. Advanced users can decipher the model name of this barebone-kit and find out that it comes in the G5 chassis.