Since we have the system opened up, we’ll go ahead and take a look at what it takes to set up the XPC SB51G. Once the case is removed, it’s best to also remove the drive rack from the system. This will clear up space for you to work with the processor socket and heatsink installation.

Shuttle does a fine job at workmanship when it comes to the interior of the system. There are no sharp edges to worry about when you’re trying to maneuver wires and cables inside the cramped space. To remove the rack, just remove the top two screws holding the rack to the system. Once the rack is removed, you will then see the Shuttle I.C.E. heatpipe technology. I.C.E. stands for Integrated Cooling Engine and is an ingenious method of both cooling the processor and keeping the system noise to a minimum. As you can see in the following pictures, the processor heatpipe channels heat away from the processor towards the rear radiator. The rear system fan then blows air onto the radiator thereby removing the heat from the system. Since there is only one fan to deal with, the overall system noise is lowered dramatically.

The I.C.E. system	The copper underside
The rear radiator	See right through it

The heatpipes

We will begin by removing the I.C.E. assembly from the insides of the case. The first step is to remove the rear fan which is held into place by four thumbscrews. Once the fan mechanism is removed, you can remove the rest of the heatpipe technology which is held into place by the heatsink clips.

Once the 478 pin socket is revealed, we went ahead and installed a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 533MHz Front Side Bus processor. This system will ultimately contain a 3.06GHz processor but the 2.4 GHz processor is used as a baseline for all of our current benchmarks. We installed the processor and then placed the heatsink/heatpipe assembly back into position. Use the heatsink clamps to ensure a good fit on top of the socket and heatsink rentention mechanism. Once the rear fan is screwed in, we’re all set to move on to the next item.

The empty socket	A closer look at it	Pentium 4 2.4 GHz installed
The heatsink clamps	I.C.E. installed	A top view of I.C.E.

Another view

You are advised to install your memory modules at this point since the drive rack is not obstructing your field of vision. This doesn’t mean that installing the memory will be too difficult later but you might as well get this done now. We installed one stick of DDR 333 memory from Crucial (512MB capacity).

The two empty DDR slotss	Now with one bank filled

It’s now time to go back to the drive rack and install our DVD ROM drive and the hard drive. We used a 120GB Maxtor 7200 RPM drive and a black bezel Lite-ON DVD drive. We installed the Maxtor hard drive on the bottom compartment – below the external 3.5” bay. Before installing the Lite-On drive, we had to remove the front face of the external 5.25” drive bay. There are some individuals who prefer to keep that 5.25” front face. If you fall into that department, then you might want to try to do some drive modding at this point which is beyond the scope of this article. Once you are finished screwing in the drives, attach the IDE cables to the motherboard and put them into place. Shuttle includes IDE cables that are of pretty exacting lengths. The IDE cable for the hard drive is just long enough to snake below the drive rack and yet not use up too much room internally. The DVD ROM drive’s IDE cable runs along the outside left of the case before coming back into the center of the case in the rear. Once the IDE cables were in position, we placed the drive rack back into the XPC and then connected the remaining cables.

Drive Rack removed	The inside of the rack	The Lite-On DVD ROM drive
The Maxtor Hard Drive	The two drives installed	Front view of the drive rack

Everything installed - a view from the left side	and a view from the right side

Now we’re ready to close up the case and tune some BIOS settings. Here are screenshots of the BIOS.

After the BIOS tuning, we can begin some Operating System installations. For all of our XPC system reviews, we will install Windows XP Professional. We will have an XPC machine dedicated to a Linux OS at some point in the near future.

The Windows XP Professional OS installed easily on the SB51G. Once the OS was installed and patched, we went ahead and installed all of the Intel chipset drivers for the system.

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