The belly of the beast
The SB75G2's black exterior is certainly sexy, but inner beauty is supposed to be what's important, right?

The view from above...

and from the side

The SB75G2's internals look cluttered, but there's really no way around a little mess when working with a small form factor platform. Fortunately, there's just enough room around each of the system's slots and sockets to make component installation possible in such cramped quarters.

As tight as the SB75G2 is, there's still plenty of room around the motherboard's 478-pin Pentium 4 socket.

Because the XPC form factor offers such little board real estate, the SB75G2 has only two DDR 400 DIMM slots. Most Canterwood boards have four DIMM slots organized in two DIMM pairs. Having only two slots limits the SB75G2's memory upgrade potential, but when you're dealing with a smaller form factor, some sacrifices have to be made. Shuttle has, however, blessed the cube with plenty to storage potential: two IDE ports and two Serial ATA ports.

Like the rest of Shuttle's cubes, the SB75G2 follows a non-standard PCI/AGP slot layout that puts the AGP slot on the outside edge of the board. Without cutting up the SB75G2's side panel, the system isn't compatible with double-wide graphics cards like NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5800, 5900, and 5950 Ultra boards.

Shuttle does what it can to clean up the SB75G2's internals by routing power cables around the system's frame. The short power cord on the SB75G2's 250W power supply is even sheathed to tidy things up.

To help making working inside the SB75G2 a little easier, the system's drive bay cage is removable. The cage has a couple of 3.5" bays, so it's technically possible to run a pair of hard drives in addition to a 5.25" optical drive. However, because of the system's cramped internals and limited air flow, heat could be a concern with more than one hard drive.