At first, the SK83G's internals look a little too crowded for comfort. However, as with other XPCs, the SK83G's drive bay cage pops out to open things up.

Without a removable drive bay cage, the SK83G would be all but impossible to work on. Thankfully, the cage can easily be removed by loosening a couple of screws. The cage has one external 5.25" bay, an external 3.5" bay, and an internal 3.5" bay. However, I wouldn't recommend running two hard drives directly on top of each other. There's not much air flow around the front of the case, and the prospect of running two high-speed drives that close to each other makes me a little nervous.

Popping the drive bay cage reveals a surprisingly spacious interior, including plenty of room to work around the CPU socket. It's a little odd to see AMD's 754-pin Athlon 64 socket surrounded by a heat sink retention bracket designed for Intel's Socket 478, though. More on the cube's cooling in a moment.

As our tour of the SK83G's internals continues, you'll find all the storage-related ports clustered together towards the front of the case. The cube's Serial ATA ports are of the locking variety, which is a huge plus if you're going to be moving the case around a lot. For all their thin, flexible goodness, Serial ATA cables tend to come loose if they're not plugged into locking ports. Shuttle also ships the SK83G with shortened IDE and SATA cables to ensure that the cube's internals aren't dominated by bundles of excess cable.

Moving to memory, the SK83G has a couple of DIMM slots and supports up to 2GB of DDR400. Since the 754-pin Athlon 64's memory controller is a single-channel design, you can run the system with only one DIMM and still achieve optimal performance.

Shuttle's XPC form factor doesn't leave enough board real estate for more than two DIMM slots, but that's hardly a crushing blow to the SK83G. It's not uncommon to see full ATX Athlon 64 platforms with only two DIMM slots, so the SK83G isn't much worse off than the rest of the Athlon 64 world in that respect.

Shuttle's XPC expansion slot organization puts AGP on the outer edge of the motherboard, making the cubes incompatible with double-wide graphics cards like NVIDIA's latest GeForce 6800 Ultra. Of course, the 6800 Ultra would probably choke the SK83G's 240W power supply, so the cube's slot configuration might not be a huge issue.

While we're looking at the AGP slot, notice the bright yellow CMOS reset jumper. In addition to having a handy Clear CMOS button in the rear port cluster, the SK83G's CMOS reset jumper is also easily accessible.

Snapping pictures of the SK83G's internals was surprisingly easy thanks to Shuttle's careful cable routing and liberal use of zip ties. The cube even comes with a couple of extra zip ties so you can clean up the wiring once drives and expansion cards are installed.