• 1x Shuttle SB75G2
• ICE CPU heat-pipe and thermal paste
• Cables: 1x floppy, 1x ATA100, 1x cdrom, 1x SATA cable
• All the necessary screws, twin-adhesive tape, silver front feet
• Motherboard Manual, Driver CD, and XPC Installation Guide
• Mandrake Linux 9.2 (2 cds)

Standard fare, for the most part. What stands out, are the Mandrake 9.2 cds. Shuttle has partnered with Mandrake and will be bundling their version of Linux with every SB52G2, SB62G2, and SB75G2 XPC. I'll talk about this a little more later, as I run through the installation of Mandrake to see if I encounter any difficulties.

Design

Let's take a look at some pictures of the SB75G2 and discuss how Shuttle decided to put it together. We enjoy being critical here at 2CPU.com.

The SB75G2, as did the SB52G2, uses Shuttle's G2 face plate. It's probably my personal favorite of all their designs thus far. Sleek and attractive, it's suited for the corporate world or the posh enthusiast who demands a stunning boxen.

As we also noticed on the SB52G2, Shuttle has decided to go with passive ventilation grills on the SB75G2. This is a great idea in my opinion, because it's a simple way for them to keep the temperatures down while not taking away from the cube's appearance. If you put your hand up against the grill, you will feel some air moving around. In the shot above, you'll notice that you can check out my Elsa Quadro through the grill.

The front of the SB75G2 comes equipped with the regular ports, buttons and LEDs. 2 USB, a firewire and the standard audio ports (headphone, line-in, microphone) mesh beautifully with the G2 face plate.

Sliding along to the back of the SB75G2, we're presented with four USB 2.0 ports, another firewire port and our Gigabit Ethernet jack. Since the i875P chipset doesn't have any integrated video capabilities, there are no DB15 or s-video out ports on the rear-end of the SB75G2. Of course, it has the main audio jacks, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, and even a couple of serial ports. While a parallel port isn't a standard option, there is a cut-out available at the top rear of the casing, and you can purchase it as an accessory from Shuttle. It plugs into a header on the motherboard.

On the back of the SB75G2, Shuttle placed the SPDIF input and output jacks. If you planned on using the SB75G2 as a HTPC and you were placing it in a rack with the rest of your home theatre components, this location would make sense since you could run the cables from the back, keep everything nice and neat and love the digital audio capabilities of this little box.

Moving inside, we see that Shuttle decided to actively cool the north bridge with a small heatsink and fan. Given the overclocking abilities of this cube (which we'll look at briefly later on) this seems to have been a prudent decision. I did take a moment to stop the fan from spinning and didn't notice that it had any major impact on the overall noise output.

Shuttle's ICE cooler probably doesn't need much of an introduction at this point, but we'll mention it briefly anyways. This is the perfect cooling solution for such a cramped space. A copper finish for optimal heat transfer from your processor, heat pipes to transfer the heat to the small rad at the back of the cube, which is then cooled and ventilated by an 80mm, temperature controlled fan. Furthermore, it's a cinch to install. It had no problems keeping my 3.2GHz P4C cool.