The ability to have a sexed-up high-powered beast confined to spaces as small as a gerbil's home is incredible. Very few manufacturers can lay claim to such design ingenuity as Shuttle -- they are, after all, the folks that fashioned the mini PC into a niche.
The XPC SN62G2 is a socket 478 system based around Intel's i865G chipset. Like the SN45G (Atomic 33, page 58), it supports 800MHz FSB, and is kitted with two Dual Channel DDR memory slots. For network connectivity, they opted for two 10/100Mb/s Ethernet ports.
As with most mini PCs, only video cards that are non-PCI slot hogging will fit, thus ruling out many FX cards. If positioned one slot's-worth to the right, most cards would fit nicely without major surgery, but this isn't the case.
After throwing in a Pentium 4 3.0GHz, 512MB of DDR400 and a 128MB Ti4800SE card (the onboard video is capable of sharing up to 16MB system memory), we ran the Quake 3 Arena CPU benchmark -- scoring a very respectable 346.95fps. This demonstrates just what's so attractive about these PCs-- small in size, large at heart. Like a mute Jack Russel.
There are several overclocking options and the FSB is capable of reaching 255MHz, but it scarcely wanted to go over a 5MHz increase in the FSB with our highly overclockable 3.0GHz P4. Not designed for overclocking, this is best left alone without chillier-than-air cooling.
This mini bundle of black beastly glory is an awesome performer, and with two Ethernet ports, it's a worthy contender for a deceivingly small monster LAN box -- or even a desktop replacement.
Issue: 111 | April, 2010