Excellent Small Form Factor Case & Motherboard

I picked up this SFF case from NewEgg.com about six months ago to replace my tower PC, which tended to lock up unexpectedly and sounded like a jet engine with all the fans inside of it. Right out of the box, I was amazed by the tiny size of the SN45G. The specs pointed out that it had onboard networking, USB 2.0, Firewire, hardware accelerated audio, and even integrated video, all of which were very impressive for something not much larger than a shoebox.

I moved my AMD Athlon XP 2200+, RAM, hard drive, and ATI Radeon 9600XT from my tower into this box, which took about 30 minutes of fiddling with screws and carefully placing components. Instead of a dedicated heat sink and fan for the CPU, Shuttle use their "Heat Pipe" technology, which is a large metal block that screws down over the CPU. Water filled conduits run from the block to a large heat sink and fan at the back of the case, which blows hot air from the entire machine out the back. The fan is large, but very quiet, and with the small amount of space inside the box, it's easy to imagine that the entire volume of this case is refreshed with new, cooler air every few seconds.

There are only two RAM slots, which was fine since my memory at the time consisted of two 512MB DIMMS. A new DVD-RW drive fit into the lone 5 1/4" space, and my hard drive was screwed into one of the two 3 1/2" bays. Special short IDE cables included by Shuttle ran from the motherboard to the drives, routed via small plastic clips. No floppy drive was installed, but could have been into the single 3 1/2" space with front panel access.

With only one AGP slot and one PCI slot, there wasn't a lot of room for expansion. However, I only needed to move my Radeon video card into this box. The onboard networking and audio are more than adequate, so I sold my old Netgear and SoundBlaster Live! cards to a friend.

Once that was done, I reinstalled WinXP Home to initialize all the drivers for the new motherboard, and was on my way. The nForce2 chipset has been amazingly stable. This machine has only crashed once in six months, and I'm almost certain that was due to a bad application. I've used it for gaming (HL2 runs great), music production, email, web surfing, software development, and standard business and office applications, all without a hitch.

About two months ago, moved a second hard drive into this box, and added an external firewire audio interface, for professional multichannel audio work. Because the space between drives is limited, I noticed that the operating temperature of the drives rose a few degrees. I threw a slot cooler into the PCI slot space, which helps keep the inside of the case cool at the expense of a tiny amount more noise. It seems that newer designs by Shuttle have slightly better cooling for storage devices, but if you're only going to have one internal hard drive, the build in cooling should be adequate.

Overall, I'm very happy with this box, and will probably never buy another tower case again.