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Shuttle SB77G5 – A Socket 775 Barebone in a New Enclosure

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Interior arrangement and functionality




As usual, to remove the lid from the SB77G5 case you just have to unscrew three wing nuts on the rear panel, another two screws to pull out the drive cage, and four latches hold the front panel. Thus, it will take several seconds to get a system ready for assemblage and upgrades, almost without a screwdriver.




The drive cage is quite standard, it can easily accommodate two hard drives or a hard drive and a floppy drive. Then it should be put back into place to proceed to CD/DVD drive installation afterwards. Mark the insulating padding in places where the drive cage may touch a video card and a chipset heatsink – everything is well thought-out and requires no meddling during installation.




Access 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.




G5 PC case marks the long-awaited break-through in the internal arrangement of barebones from Shuttle: at last we are delivered from the tangle of wires and cables! Interface connectors for the front panel are cleverly placed on the front edge of the PCB now, and the S/PDIF-Out, audio ins and the CPU cooler header – at the rear edge. Power cables (and even interface ones, if necessary) are neatly laid along the case racks with the help of holes in the racks and clips from the bundle. As a result, nothing blocks access to functional elements and vent holes – hip-hip-hurrah! We've been waiting for it so long from this barebone-building leader.




However, there is a small fly in the ointment. When we disassembled the kit (to take a photo of it), we disconnected the interface cable of the front panel (very thin, foil-shielded). After that all available human resources of our test lab have been trying to plug this cable back into the connector for half an hour. Be warned and don't repeat this experiment. :)




On the whole, the successful (in our opinion) appearance of the G5 PC case is supplemented by the excellent internal arrangement, which offers nothing principally new but finally allows to get rid of disadvantages of old Shuttle G/G2/G4 series.




SB77G5 is based on the Shuttle FB77 motherboard on Intel 875P + ICH5R, but intended for Socket 775 processors. This chipset used to be unrivaled in performance only a year ago (the only exception was the overclocked i865PE), but the "regular" platform for Socket 775 (i915/925 chipsets) offers no less performance but possesses a set of features, which are very interesting for users. The i875P has two advantages in this field: the support for AGP video cards (the currently existing solutions with PCI Express provide only a PCIEx16 graphics slot) and a price. The former factor seems of little importance: unlike a user who's upgrading his or her desktop computer, it doesn't matter to a buyer of a new system (they are the majority of those who have chosen Shuttle XPC) a video card with what interface to buy – AGP and PCIE modifications have approximately the same price. The overall price of the system also levels down the lower price of the i875P relative to the i9xx. Besides, the i875P lacks integrated graphics, which will not disappoint gamers, but the others will have to waste money on a video card, which would have been not necessary otherwise (if you remember the level of 3D performance offered by i915G, part of gamers could have been quite content with such integrated video).

Going back to the features of the motherboard, let's briefly enumerate its characteristics provided by the chipset: support for Intel Pentium 4, Pentium 4 Extreme Edition and Celeron D (Socket 775), up to 2 GB of DDR266/333/400 RAM (the motherboard has only 2 DIMM slots) capable of operating in dual-channel mode, AGP 8x bus for external video accelerators, two SATA ports supporting RAID 0 and 1, two UATA133 channels for 4 devices, 8 USB 2.0 ports and 6-channel audio (Realtek ALC650 AC'97-codec). At the time the article was published, the SB77G5 was announced to support all currently existing processors with 533/800 MHz bus. Besides, this motherboard contains a VIA VT6307 controller, which provides two FireWire ports, and Broadcom BCM5788KFB network adapter (10/100/1000 Mbit/sec Gigabit Ethernet). There is one AGP and one PCI slot (a standard solution for Shuttle and Soltek barebones), and the AGP slot is closer to the board edge, which excludes video accelerators with bulky cooling systems. As the PCI slot is under the drive cage, it can accommodate a card no longer than 13 cm or a low-profile one. The board has an IrDA port to connect standard devices, audio CD-In and AUX-In, as well as three fan headers.

The integrated audio quality was tested in 16bit, 44 kHz using the RightMark Audio Analyzer 5.4 test application and the Terratec DMX 6fire sound card:

Frequency response (from 40 Hz to 15 kHz), dB:
+0.15, -0.13
Very good
Noise level, dB (A):
-84.6
Good
Dynamic range, dB (A):
84.0
Good
THD, %:
0.0076
Very good
Intermodulation distortion, %:
0.048
Good
Channel crosstalk, dB:
-81.6
Very good
IMD at 10 kHz, %:
0.050
Good

General performance: Good.

Shuttle FB77 offers decent overclocking features, which is common among modern barebones. BIOS Setup allows to increase FSB frequency to 355 MHz at 1 MHz steps, to raise AGP and memory voltage to 2.9 and 1.8 V correspondingly at 0.1 V steps, to modify CPU voltage from 0.825 to 1.5875 V at 0.0125 V steps, as well as to control timing settings and fix PCI/AGP/SATA bus frequencies at normal or increased values. Theoretically, the powerful supply unit and good 4-phase voltage regulator of the processor allow to count on successful overclocking. The only jumper on the board resets CMOS. However the mentioned button on the rear panel will surely allow to do it with more convenience.

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Sergei Pikalov (peek@ixbt.com)
February 28, 2005

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