Internally Shuttle has done well with the layout of the system. In the picture above you can see how the system looks with the cover removed. Let’s have a look at the components themselves.

First up we have the drive bay, its designed to hold one DVD/CD drive and either two hard drives or one HD and one floppy drive. Installation of the drive involves removing the bay and screwing in the drives. Simple.

The shuttle PSU runs along the length of the case and is a 240w model in this system. Despite being extremely compact the PSU fans are very quiet and don’t seem to have any problems cooling the unit.

Power to the system is provided in the form of a 20pin and 4 pin connector, these are placed directly behind the PSU and so there is very little wire needed and therefore as little clutter as possible in the system.

Also near to the PSU (infact directly underneath) are the memory slots and floppy connector, in this model there are 2 memory slots which are capable of Dual Channel mode and can contain 2x 1024mb of memory. The only issue you are likely to run into is that memory sticks such as Corsairs new Xpert series are not likely to fit in the slots due to their height. Any normal sticks are more than fine though.

Moving over to the other side of the system we can see the 2 IDE slots which are placed near the front of the case. Shuttle provides 1 IDE cable pre installed in the system and this is folded and runs through the system in a very tidy fashion. A nice touch.

Next to the IDE ports we have the chipset cooler. The board features the Nforce 3 chipset and the cooler provides more than adequate cooling. Some manufacturers don’t even cool the NF3 chipset so its nice to see shuttle taking no chances. The fan on the heat sink is quiet which is good however the attachment between the heat sink and motherboard isn’t the most sturdy and you can rock the heat sink quite easily with your hand.

Beside the chipset cooler we gave the final ports of interest. You can see in the picture above the AGP and PCI slots. Nothing out of the ordinary here as the AGP is 8x. Behind the PCI slot you can see the 2 SATA connectors which sit directly below the SATA drives when the system is assembled.

 

Previous: Shuttle

Next: Shuttle (continued 3)