Interior arrangement and functionality

When you open the lid, you will see practically the same design as in the G5 series, including the layout and drive cage, which can accommodate the same number of storage drives: two hard drives (or a hard drive and a 3.5-inch floppy) and an optical drive. Cables for one SATA and two PATA drives are neatly laid in the enclosure.

However, power cables are not fixed in position at all, although they either come with clips or tubes to give a visual semblance of order inside. All in all, you can plug three devices with a trapezoidal peripheral connector, one device with a floppy connector, and two SATA drives. In fact, the drive cage can accommodate just as many drives. Only make sure you have all necessary adapters in the bundle of your graphics card, because the power supply unit has neither 6-pin nor 8-pin cables. As the graphics slot is placed at the edge, you can install a single-slot card only. However, one of possible choices is Radeon HD4850 -- we've installed this card for our tests. This card is faster than the voracious dual-slot GeForce 9800 GTX. We cannot imagine that a compact computer needs a faster solution. However, as the graphics slot is placed at the edge of the board, designers managed to free some room, so no components interfere with installing a long graphics card, as far as the enclosure allows.

The PSU is installed just like in G5 enclosures (300 W in this case), which also helps channel the heat away from the enclosure.

The motherboard is marked FN68 and based on NVIDIA GeForce 7050 + nForce 630a. The following functions are implemented:

• Supports AMD Athlon 64/X2 and Sempron processors (Socket AM2) with TDP up to 89 W, the list of processors, memory modules, and graphics cards, tested for compatibility, is published on the website
• Supports up to 4 GB of DDR2-533/667/800 memory (two DIMM slots) and dual-channel mode
• Integrated GeForce 7050 supporting PureVideo and DirectX 9.0
• PCIEx16 graphics slot
• PCI slot
• 8 x USB 2.0, 4 x SATA-II for two SATA300 devices (with NCQ support), two of them are eSATA ports, 1 x PATA133 channel for two devices, FDD connector for a floppy drive
• 7.1-channel audio (Realtek ALC888DD HDA codec supporting DTS Connect and Dolby Digital Live!, digital audio output encoding into multi-channel formats)
• 2 x FireWire (TI TSB43AB22A controller)
• Gigabit Ethernet port supporting 10/100/1000 Mbps (based on the chipset and Marvell 88E1116 PHY controller).

The board also contains two fan headers, Aux-In for a CD drive, SPDIF-In/Out, CIR, connector for PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors, connector for a parallel port.

The integrated audio quality was tested in 16 bit 44 kHz mode using RightMark Audio Analyzer 6.0.5 and the ESI Juli@ sound card:

General performance: Very good. These are praiseworthy results, they are not perfect only because of a slightly higher noise level than in the best modifications of this codec on motherboards. But from the practical point of view, it has the least effect on subjective audio quality unlike various distortions (and these parameters are brilliant here).

The board features a 3-phase voltage regulator for a processor with three field-effect transistors per channel, 10 x 820 uF and 3 x 330 uF capacitors. The board uses only brand solid-state capacitors in all circuits. There are no jumpers on the board, you have to press a button on the rear panel to clear CMOS -- this convenient solution is used in many Shuttle products.

There are additional controllers with the USB interface inside the enclosure:

• Wi-Fi, based on Realtek RTL8187L, IEEE 802.11a/b/g compliant
• Bluetooth, based on Broadcom BCM2045, compatible with Bluetooth 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, supporting 1, 2, and 3 Mbps EDR data exchange rates
• Fingerprint scanner based on the USBest UT171 controller.

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