Cracking the case
Without an internal power supply, the ST62K's internals are a little more spacious than other XPCs.

The view from above...

and from the side

A little more, but not much. Working in small form factor systems is always going to be tight, and the ST62K is no exception.

One thing that could make the ST62K easier to work with is a removable drive cage. Unfortunately, the system's external drive bays are a part of the chassis and can't really be removed.

Shuttle makes amends for the lack of a removable drive bay cage with a nifty hard drive enclosure that's easy to pop out by loosening a single thumbscrew.

In another nice little touch, Shuttle neatly routes the ST62K's internal cables along the ST62K's frame. Shuttle's solution isn't quite as clean as routing cables inside the chassis itself, but it still does a good job of reducing clutter while ensuring that all cables are easily accessible.

Moving along, the ST62K's FT62 motherboard is dominated by a standard Socket 478 heat sink retention bracket. The board is compatible with Socket 478 processors on a 400, 533, or 800MHz front-side bus, which gives users a wide range of chip choices between high-end Pentium 4s and low-end Celerons. The FT62's manual states that processor support is limited to Northwood chips, so it's unlikely that Intel's upcoming Prescott Pentium 4 processors will be supported.

On the memory front, the ST62K's two DIMM slots support a maximum of 2GB of DDR400 memory. The Radeon 9100 IGP's dual-channel memory controller performs best with two DIMMs installed, though users can run a single memory stick if necessary.

Moving to storage, the ST62K's has a couple of ATA/133 IDE ports, but no Serial ATA support. Thin, flexible Serial ATA cables are really ideal for small form factor systems, so it's disappointing to see Serial ATA missing from the ST62K. However, since ATI doesn't make a south bridge chip with integrated Serial ATA, Shuttle would have had to add a third-party SATA controller to the board to give users a Serial ATA option.

If users really want Serial ATA, they can populate the ST62K's single PCI slot with a Serial ATA card. The ST62K's PCI slot is also ready for a Wi-Fi card, a high-end sound card, or a TV capture card, but since there's only one slot, users will have to pick and choose carefully.