The Core 2 Duo's lower power requirements and heat production make it ideal for use in a small case. Shuttle hasn't wasted any time in providing such a product with its XPC SD37P2 barebones case. From the outside it looks sleek, with brushed metal doors covering the drive bays. The shiny black plastic also looks good, although it's likely to pick up fingerprints.
As with other Shuttle barebones cases, the XPC SD37P2's lid comes off with the removal of four thumbscrews. There's a surprising amount of room inside for such a small case. Two hard disk bays lie over the top of the external drive bays. You'll have to unscrew and remove the hard disk caddies if you want to install an optical drive. This is easy to do and the external drive caddy slips out of the case easily. As well as room for an optical drive, the case has a floppy disk bay, which you can also use for a third hard disk or memory card reader. It's a pity Shuttle doesn't bundle one of its own memory card readers, though.
The LGA775 processor socket sits beneath a meaty heatsink, which is screwed to the motherboard. It has one 60mm fan attached to it and an 80mm fan in front of it. With the power supply's fan and two 60mm fans at the rear too, you get a lot of cooling. Individually the fans aren't particularly loud, but the cumulative effect is louder that we'd have expected. Fortunately, the fans didn't get louder under load, as with Shuttle's XPC SB95P V2, which would speed up the fans as soon as a game started.
The motherboard uses Intel's 975X chipset, which supports ATI's CrossFire. Shuttle has placed the two x16 PCI-E slots, which run at x8 speed in CrossFire mode, extremely close together. Considering that ATI's high-end CrossFire cards take up two slots, there's not enough room to install two of them. That leaves the possibility of installing two mid-range cards in CrossFire mode, but performance-wise you'd be better off with one X1900 XT. While you can still use the second x16 PCI-E slot for any PCI Express expansion card, we think the XPC SD37P2 would have been better served with a PCI slot.
The four DDR2 memory slots support DDR2 800MHz memory, so you've got plenty of room for installing fast memory. Running our standard tests, the SD37P2 scored well but was a little behind other Intel 975-based computers. There's a lot to like about this case, though. Shuttle has finally managed to fit enough expansion ports: the rear houses six USB2, FireWire, eSata and audio ports, while the front has a further two USB2, FireWire, headphone and microphone ports.
If you're looking to build a PC with a Core 2 Duo processor, the SD37P2 case is a good option, as it's well-built, small and expandable. However, the CrossFire support isn't really necessary, and a standard PCI slot would have been better.
System Specifications
BAREBONES CASE Takes Intel LGA775 processors, four DIMM slots, three SATA2 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, eight USB2, two FireWire, 5.1 audio, co-axial S/PDIF, two x16 PCI-E, 5" drive bay, three 3" drive bays (two internal, one external)
Author: David Ludlow
Computer Shopper Online