Opening 'er up
Sliding off the SB86i's steel skin reveals an all-new interior that's reminiscent of Shuttle's P-series chassis.

Up top, the SB86i has a couple of hard drive cages that cry out for RAID. The drive cages don't get much in the way of direct air flow, but they're a joy to work with.

The cages are secured with a single thumb screw, and Shuttle has neatly arranged the cube's Serial ATA data and power cables to be exactly where you need them. They've even equipped the hard drive cages with rubber grommets to dampen vibration noise.

Removing the SB86i's hard drive cages yields access to the optical drive cage, which isn't nearly as fancy. The 5.25" cage is a simple affair that apparently wasn't worthy of thumb screws or rubber grommets.

With the drive cages removed, the cube's cooler can easily be popped out, and then things really start to open up.

To the right of the cube we have the PCI Express and PCI slots. PCI-E is on the inside, but since we're on the right side of the board, the graphics card faces inward. This arrangement puts the graphics card cooler directly in the path of BTX's front-to-back wind tunnel, which seems like a good idea, especially for passively-cooled graphics cards. However, the SB86i's slot arrangement is such that double-wide graphics cards like ATI's Radeon X850 XT and NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Ultra won't fit.

Around the left, the SB86i's DIMM slots are easily accessible. The DIMM slots don't get a lot of direct air flow, though. The cube's side panels aren't vented, and the memory modules are too close to the edge of the board to benefit from the front-to-back BTX air flow.

Popping out the SB86i's motherboard gives us a better idea of how things are arranged. Note that the board is designed for left-to-right cooling. Cool air from the system's intakes is blown over the CPU socket and across the passive north and south bridge coolers before being exhausted from the case. The motherboard layout conforms to Intel's Pico BTX spec, although it's unclear whether you'll be able to swap it out for other Pico BTX boards.