Shuttle SD37P2

The FD37V1 motherboard is the core of the SD37P2. It is based around the mature 975X chipset and ICH7R Southbridge which supports a maximum of four SATA devises. Shuttle has translated this into three internal SATA ports as well as one eSATA which means you can still have up to four disks in the same RAID array (obviously you'll need to keep your eSATA plugged in).

There are four DIMM slots as opposed to the usual two, this provides great potential in expandability. The board supports up to 8GB of ram which should be more than anyone needs bar using it for a server. Unfortunately only 667MHz memory is the maximum supported, rather than the 800MHz found on many other 975X boards. This is somewhat detrimental to performance and doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in the overclocking potential of the board.

The chipset heatsinks are passively cooled, as is the voltage regulation components. Despite the fact that XPCs are basically little ovens, the passive cooling still keeps the components stable under extended load.

There are two PCI-Express x16 slots included, but they are hard-wired in as PCI-Express x8 slots electrically. This means that even if you're using only one graphics card, it'll still be running at x8 speeds, although it should not affect the performance at any noticeable level. The slots are positioned in such a way in the P2 chassis that allows dual slot cooled cards to be used, but sacrifices the second slot. Even if two single slot cards are used in CrossFire, for example, there would be extremely minimal gap between them for ventilation an you would need to use one of the PCI-Express power adapters that come in most mid-to-high end video card bundles.

Due to the way the expansion slots are laid out, there's also the fact that your graphics card sucks in hot air from the centre of the case as well, rather than facing the outside of the case and getting cold air from the outside. Unfortunately, unless your peripherals are USB as well, there's really no way to add in extra functionality, although there are eight USB 2.0 ports available.

We did find a conflict during testing: plugging in the IDE cable, it lent against and actually stopped the fan on our GeForce 7900 GTX. Because we left the top off at first we noticed this by sheer chance, however we fear many people will put their SD37P2's together and then put the top on before switching it on for the first time. This could likely overheat the graphics card causing damage or death to it or the unit. Due to the confined space, we highly suggest making sure all fans are working properly before putting the lid back on.

Shuttle goes the route of full customisation when it comes to power. The ATX cable is gone - that's far too inconvenient! (I hope you're being sarcastic there... - Ed.) Instead the motherboard power from the PSU is split into two plugs, one 8-pin (7 used), one 6-pin. Whilst this is only a grand total of 13 wires providing all the power for the CPU, memory, graphics and motherboard it still works perfectly fine and remained perfectly stable even with a Core 2 Extreme X6800, a BFGTech GeForce 7900 GTX OC and 2GB of Corsair PC8500C5 memory installed. This is despite the fact that more power connectors mean more power distribution, which gives less electrical noise and localised hotspots or potential wire melting.