Monday, March 27, 2006
Powerful, Small, Stealthy: Shuttle's SD11G5 XPC
Posted by Jason Dunn in "HARDWARE" @ 09:15 AM
The Shuttle SD11G5 in Pictures
Figure 5: The SD11G5 has a great look. My shoddy photography doesn't do it justice. In this photo the protective plastic is still on. The white looks great, though I wish it came in black as an option since my dual monitors, keyboard, and mouse are black.
Figure 6: The bottom front panel pops down with a simple press on the right side, and reveals (from left to right) a microphone jack, headphone jack, two USB 2.0 ports, and a 4-pin Firewire 400 port. These ports make it easy to connect USB thumbdrives, digital video cameras, etc. A couple of years ago I would have complained about the lack of a front-facing 6-pin Firewire port, but Firewire is less and less common these days, so the 4-pin is sufficient.
Figure 7: This panel clicks down with a press. You can see the top of my hard drive just inside the revealed space.
Figure 8: The rear of the SD11G5. The right hand side shows the slots for PCI Express cards.
Figure 9: Ports, ports, everywhere! From top left on down: optical audio input and output, analog ports for 7.1 surround sound, a CMOS reset button, a single six-pin Firewire port, a keyboard and mouse port, and an S-Video out port for connecting to a TV set (does anyone really do that anymore?). Moving right we have a gigabit Ethernet port, two USB 2.0 ports, VGA and DVI ports, and the power connection point. More USB ports would have been nice to see, but given the size constraints it's still impressive how much they can jam onto the back of this.
Figure 10: A side view of the SD11G5.
Figure 11: A closer look. Notice the large heatsink on the chipset for passive (and silent) cooling. The Pentium M CPU is on the left, and while slightly smaller, is connected to the passive cooling pipes that run to the back fan. Two slots for DDR2 RAM, the unit maxes out at 2GB total.
Figure 12: The other side of the SD11G5. There's one x16 PCI Express slot for a video card, and another x1 slot for whenever x1 PCI Express cards become available. There's so much built into the machine though, I'm not sure what you'd add here. A RAID card perhaps?
Figure 13: The slow-spinning fan. It's a smart fan (controlled by the BIOS) capable of going up to 3000+ RPM, but in day to day use the fan spins at a mere 869 RPM. You have to put your head next to the SD11G5 to hear the fan – it's that quiet. Even putting the CPU under 100% load didn't increase the fan to audible levels, though the fan did speed up.
