Shuttle SD36G5M XPC

The Shuttle SD36G5M is equipped with a Phoenix - Award BIOS that is complete with a healthy selection of options. Walking through the first few menus, we see the standard collection of options covering drive details, boot priority, and other basic configuration details.

A few more customized options begin to become available as we progress through the Advanced Chipset and Integrated Peripherals pages. Here, the user can determine how much memory will be allocated to the integrated graphics as well as enable or disable the onboard audio controller.

The OnChip IDE Devices menu grants the user the ability to customize the behavior of the onboard SATA controller as well as tailor the modes for all other IDE devices. In similar fashion, all integrated or onboard features can be tailored in the subsequent screens as well.

Power Management and PCI/PnP configurations are the next orders of business with standard fare options available for each. Moving to the PC Health screen, we see a wide variety of system temperatures and voltages being monitored with appropriate warnings and safety precautions available. Glimpsing the voltages being reported in the screenshot above, we find that there is more than enough power at our disposal using our selected configuration.

When SFF systems first began appearing on the market several years ago, there were no overclocking options and limited voltage settings at best. Fortunately, times have changed and the SD36G5M offers a nice range of voltage options for the CPU, chipset, and memory. In addition, the user is able to control all desired memory timings to further customize operation, increase performance, and provide stability.