Digital Home Thoughts: Shuttle’s ST62K XPC: Small & Silent

Putting it All Together
Assembling the Shuttle was a relatively quick process, and building your own computer is a rewarding experience – although you’re robbed of the pulse-pounding experience of wondering if you grounded the motherboard correctly and wondering if everything will short out when you hit the power button. :laugh:


Figure 6a: The pieces used for attaching your hardware to the Shuttle.

This is the third Shuttle that I’ve put together, so I knew what to expect, but if you’ve ever installed RAM or CD-R before, this isn’t much more difficult. The Shuttle comes with a well-illustrated manual, and surprisingly lucid instructions in English. From start to finish, I’d say putting your first Shuttle together would take no more than 30 minutes, even if you’re going slowly. This was, by far, the easiest assembly I’ve ever had – Shuttle has streamlined the process quite a bit. Shuttle also includes everything you need except for a Philips screwdriver, but if you don’t own one of those, you’re not the type of person that should be putting together a computer. ;-)

The package includes thermal paste for the CPU, so after inserting the 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 and locking it down, I put on some thermal paste and attached the passive heat sink. After re-attaching the fan and connecting the cable to the fan header on the motherboard, I put in two 512 MB sticks of Kingston DDR400 RAM. I then moved on to the hard drive, and my next significant disappointment with the ST62K.


Figure 6b: The inside of the ST62K.


Figure 7: The hard drive slides in from the side, and sits perpendicular to the case.

Unlike my six-month old SB62G Shuttle, this brand-new ST62K doesn’t have support for Serial ATA hard drives. This was a significant disappointment for me, because it meant I couldn’t use my two 160 GB Seagate hard drives and opted for the only spare ATA100 drive I had lying around: a 30 GB Maxtor drive. After installation, it benchmarked quite well, with an average read rate of 49 MB/s, but I would have preferred to see Serial ATA support since it’s rapidly becoming the standard hard drive interface. After some research I’ve learned that this is a limitation of ATI’s R300 chip-set, which I hope they’ll address in future versions of the chip-set.


Figure 8: A close-up of the hard drive – notice the user-friendly label.

The hard drive is installed into a sliding tray which I haven’t seen before – it slides in from the site and locks in place. The cabling was very easy to set up – everything was clearly labelled, and the optical drive cable was already attached and in place.

The ST62K has one 5.25" drive bay and two 3.5" drive bays, which means one optical drive, so make it count. I put a 52x CD-R/DVD-ROM combo drive, but if I didn’t already have an external burner in a Firewire enclosure, I would have gone for an 8x Plextor DVD burner. The two 3.5" bays allow for some options: a second hard drive, a floppy drive, or an integrated memory card reader (Shuttle has one as an accessory).

After installing the hard drive, the optical drive was easy enough, and things were pretty much finished!