Digital Home Thoughts: Powerful, Small, Stealthy: Shuttle's SD11G5 XPC

Picking the Parts
One of my favourite parts about building a Shuttle XPC is picking the parts to go inside it. I demand high performance from my PCs, so I try to pick the best parts I can, within reason. I don't mind spending money to get performance, there there's a "rationality ceiling" that I won't go above, no matter tempting it is. That's the reason I don't yet own a Voodoo PC.


Figure 14: The 2.13 Ghz Pentium M 770.

For the CPU, my choices were obviously limited to the Pentium M. At the time I built this (February 2006), there were several options, ranging from 1.63 Ghz up to 2.13 Ghz. The 2.13 Ghz CPU features 2MB of L2 cache and runs on a 533 mhz bus, but it was also a huge price jump from the 2.0 Ghz version that had the same specs other than speed. I opted for to save nearly $200 and lost only 130 Mhz of speed, but when I contacted my favourite local computer store (Memory Express) a helpful fellow named Yet offered to try and get me a deal with Intel because this was for a review. Sometimes I'm fortunate and vendors will send me hardware for review, but when it comes to CPUs, I'm on my own and almost always have to buy them (Intel has sent me one in the past, AMD always refuses). Memory Express managed to get me the 2.13 Ghz CPU for only $50 dollars more than the 2.0 Ghz version, so I went for it.


Figure 15: The glorious Raptor X.

When it came to hard drives, I had two 3.5" bays to fill, and I knew exactly what I wanted for the primary drive: when I was at CES in January 2006, Western Digital had just announced the upgrade to my beloved 74GB Raptor drives: the Raptor X. The Raptor X retains the blistering 10,000 RPM speed of its smaller siblings, and the 16MB cache, but doubles the storage to 150 GB. Here's a video of it spinning up. It has a few other features such as NCQ (Native Command Queuing), but the tests I've seen show no performance gains using NCQ in day to day desktop use. In terms of storage size, 150 GB is perfect for my needs – if I total up all my must-have software, data, and video/photos/music that I need to have on every computer I own, it comes in at about 80 GB. Everything beyond that is just gravy, though I won't deny that it would be cool to have all 60 GB of my music in there as well. 150 GB gives me enough space for my needs with plenty left over.

So what about RAID you might be asking? The Intel 915GM chipset on the SD11G5 doesn't support it. Is that a problem you might ask? Well, it depends. If you're a dyed-in-the-wool RAID fan and you absolutely need to have it, the SD11G5 isn't for you – look to one of Shuttle's bigger (and louder) XPCs such as the SB95P. I ran twin 74GB Raptors in a RAID0 array on my last Shuttle, and while it off the charts in cool factor, I have to admit that I didn't notice any significant performance increases by running RAID0. And given the performance of the Raptor X, I didn't mourn the loss of RAID in the SD11G5.

There's room for another hard drive – I plunked a 7200RPM Seagate 160 GB drive in there – so down the road it would be nice to see RAID supported if only for data redundancy purposes (RAID1). In the meantime, I run Acronis TrueImage every night, which gives me a bit for bit cloned image of everything on the Raptor X. In the case of hard drive failure, I just swap cables and restore the image. Good to go!


Figure 16: Nothing fancy, but two GB worth of reliable Kingston RAM.

I transplanted the RAM from my previous Shuttle – it's nothing overly special, no bling-bling RAM here, but it has served me well. Kingston makes very reliable RAM, and with RAM prices being what they are, everyone should be running 2 x 512MB at minimum, or 2 x 1GB if possible. I have four computers in day to day use, and three of the four have 2 GB of RAM, while the wee Fujitsu P7020 laptop gets by with 512 MB. Having 2GB of RAM is pretty amazing when I think back on my father bringing home a 40 megabyte hard drive and I was thrilled at the seemingly endless space. Of course, that didn't stop me from installing hard drive doubling software ("Stacker") and accidentally trashing the data on the whole drive while trying to get even more space. Ah, those were the days. ;-)