Cracking the case
From the outside, the ST61G4 looks pretty hot, but what about under the hood?

The view from above...

and from the side

The ST61G4's interior is a pretty standard mess of power and peripheral cables. Shuttle zip ties the odd cable to the ST61G4's frame, but tidying up cable routing is something you'll largely have to do on your own. Once all the system components are installed, all it takes is a couple of zip ties, which Shuttle provides in the box, to clean things up.

Can you spot the Serial ATA ports?

I'm continually impressed with how Shuttle manages to squeeze a full Pentium 4 heat sink retention bracket into its tiny XPC chassis. That's not to say that the socket area isn't a little crowded, though. Check out the placement of the Serial ATA ports:

At least they're not under the retention bracket

The ST61G4's Serial ATA port placement is pretty ugly by motherboard standards, but in a cube with limited board real estate, I doubt Shuttle had much choice. Thankfully, Serial ATA cables are thin and flexible enough to easily snake their way through the ST61G4's internals, despite the fact that they're anchored just behind the CPU socket.

ATI's Radeon 9100 IGP does dual-channel, too

DIMM slots and IDE ports are reasonably accessible near the front of the ST61G4's case. The system supports up to 2GB of DDR400 memory, but since DIMMs must be added in pairs for optimal dual-channel performance, the ST61G4's memory upgrade potential is more limited than systems with four DIMM slots.

Shuttle's slot layout dares to be different

Shuttle's AGP and PCI slot layout continues to thumb its nose at tradition—and at NVIDIA's high-end graphics cards. The AGP slot runs along the outside edge of the motherboard, which doesn't leave room for the double-wide coolers found on the majority of GeForce FX 5800, 5900, and 5950 Ultra graphics cards.

Shuttle sheathes all 3" of power cable

Its slot placement may not have changed, but Shuttle is pimping a new power supply for the ST61G4. The 250W "SilentX" power supply makes an appearance in this cube and will also be offered as an upgrade accessory for other XPC systems. The all-aluminum power supply has been in development for over a year and lacks the fan whine that plagues some of XPC's earlier power supplies.

250W doesn't seem like a lot for a modern PC, but it should be enough for whatever you can manage to cram into the ST61G4. My ST61G4 test configuration, which included 512MB of RAM, a Radeon 9700 Pro, and a Western Digital Raptor hard drive, was never wanting for power—even under extreme loads.

The removable drive cage returns to the G4

When Shuttle first introduced its "G4" chassis with the SN85G4, they left out the all-important removable hard drive cage. The cage makes a return in the ST61G4, and I couldn't be happier. Working on cramped small form factor systems can be pretty awkward, especially for those of us with larger hands, and removable drive bay cages can really help to open things up.