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Setup & Quality |
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How do they get it all in there? |
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The first
question that comes to one's mind is how can Shuttle
get everything into that box? Seriously, once we
removed the brushed aluminum outer shell, we looked in
at an organized set of wires and empty slots waiting
to be used. The first thing you will want to do
is to remove the tray by unscrewing two screws at the
top. Once this was removed, we got our first
glance at the "I.C.E. Thermal Module", a customized
cooling system that Shuttle has devised for their XPC
systems. We will cover this a bit later on in
the review, but for now we removed the fan first using
four thumbscrews, and then unclipped the retention
mechanism and removed the unit. We now had a
better look at the FB61 motherboard.
Shuttle
has very little room to spare on the FB61, for obvious
reasons. There's a lot of features to be found
on Springdale-based motherboards, and Shuttle did
their best to fit them all in. Dual-channel DDR
support is provided by installing memory in each of
the two slots at the front of the board. Between
the memory slots and the front of the case are both of
the IDE ports as well as the front panel header for
the USB 2.0 and Mini-Firewire ports. It does get
a bit tight when trying to get all of the cables
plugged in and we highly suggest doing so without the
tray or other hardware installed. The North
Bridge was actively cooled by a decent-sized heatsink
with a small, quiet fan on top. This is mostly
needed since the Intel Extreme Graphics engine is part
of the i865G North Bridge, which drives a fair amount
of heat.
In order
to save space, expansion capabilities must be
sacrificed somewhat, hence there is only one PCI slot
to accompany the AGP 8x slot. Since audio and
LAN capabilities are already provided on the
motherboard, this shouldn't be too much of a
limitation. Just past these two slots are the
ICH5 South Bridge, SATA hard drive connections, as
well as a vertically mounted battery. Although
we didn't use one during testing, one can see how the
small cabling profile of SATA drives would definitely
be put to good use in a small enclosure like this.
RAID configuration with the hard drives are not
supported. The ICH5R version of the South Bridge
is needed for that but there really isn't room for a
second hard drive in typical Mini PC configurations
anyway.
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The
BIOS |
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Let's turn on the juice |
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The SB61G2
is equipped with an Award / Phoenix v.6.00G BIOS that
could be found on any board, large or small.
From the Integrated Peripherals, users can enable or
disable the integrated components, and determine
whether to use IDE, SATA, or a combination of both
types of drives. Memory timings are specified in
the Advanced Chipset Features, and the speed is
chosen, but only as a subset of the FSB of the CPU.
For example, DDR400 can only be enabled when using an
800MHz FSB CPU. If a 533MHz FSB is installed,
then the only speed choices are 200/266/333. We
also were able to set the frame buffer size of the
Intel Extreme Graphics 2 here, up to a maximum of
16MB.
The PC
Health section of the BIOS has some options on
controlling the speed of the exhaust fan, and in turn,
controlling the noise output. The default
setting here is titled 'Smart Fan', which will
automatically raise the fan speed at certain
temperature levels that the user can set.
Otherwise, you can set the fan at four settings: Ultra
Low (<2000rpm), Low, Mid, or Full (>3500rpm).
Unlike XPC
systems in the past, the SB61G2 is completely
overclockable. The CPU's Front Side Bus (FSB)
can be set to any speed between 100MHz and 255MHz, in
1MHz increments. To support overclocking the FSB,
the CPU, DDR, and AGP voltages can all be raised.
CPU Voltage can be raised from 1.5V all the way up to
1.85V, while the DDR voltage choices are far less,
going only as far as 2.75V. These choices are
more than welcomed but care must be taken since heat
is definitely a consideration in small enclosures like
these.
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I.C.E. Techology |
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Adventures in cooling |
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Drastic
environments require drastic measures. In such
cramped quarters, a typical heatsink/fan combo would
not be practical, especially considering the small
40mm fan on the PSU, with no room for additional fans.
Shuttle has implemented what they call their
Integrated Cooling Engine (I.C.E.) technology.
As demonstrated in the diagram above, heat is absorbed
from the CPU from the copper base of the heatsink.
Fluid in the four heatpipes situated within the
heatsink, evaporates and travels up to the radiator
along the back wall of the XPC. There the vapor
is cooled by the large fan, turning back to liquid and
returning to the heatsink again to be reheated.
BEFORE
AFTER
One small
complaint that we had about the heatsink was that it
was left in an "unfinished" state. Often, a
heatsink left in this state may not be fully flat or
may be rough, preventing an even transfer of heat from
the CPU. We wanted to keep our system running as
cool as possible, especially if we were going to
overclock, so we decided on lapping the heatsink.
More information can be found on this technique by
searching the web, but for a quick review, this
entails sanding the heatsink surface using
increasingly smaller grit sandpaper until a mirrored
surface results. Take a quick look at the before
and after pictures to see how the reflection of the
penny is sharpened, once a mirror-like surface is
achieved.
As you can
see from the graph, lapping the heatsink did have some
effect. The CPU temperature dropped two degrees
while idle, and three degrees under load. Going
one step further, we replaced the silicon-based
thermal grease that came with the SB61G2 and applied a
thin layer of Arctic Silver 3. While the idle
temperature was recorded at a degree higher, the load
temperature dropped an additional degree. These
aren't major reductions, we agree, but still, any drop
in temperature in an small enclosure such as the XPC
is nothing but goodness.
The test systems
and first benchmarks
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